


Sympathy for the Devil

by hocuspocusfocus



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon Compliant, Child Abuse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Harringrove, Homophobia in general, Hurt/Comfort, I Think It's In Character? I Tried Anyway., Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Neil Hargrove is His Own Warning, Post-Season/Series 02, Season Three Addressed Kinda Quickly, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26140570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hocuspocusfocus/pseuds/hocuspocusfocus
Summary: “Just one more thing,” he says. His cheeks are red and he almost looks a little afraid. A slip of paper leaves his hand and drops into mine.“Aw, giving me your number, sweethea-” I begin, but his back is already turned, walking away from me hurriedly.I unfold the slip and look at the messy scrawl.In case you ever need a place to stay,it reads. There’s an address scratched below.aka- Steve invites Billy to move in with him because Neil is an asshole.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 47
Kudos: 216





	1. Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

**Author's Note:**

> All chapters of this work include trigger warnings for violence, bullying, parental-physical abuse, and time-accurate homophobia and bigotry.

It’s getting almost pitiful how Harrington doesn’t fight back. Boring, even. One moment he has the ball, me at his back, our bodies touching, and then without putting in an ounce of effort, Steve “The Hair” Harrington, the old King of Hawkins High himself, simply steps aside, allowing me easy control and a chance to dunk. His team isn’t even shocked enough to groan as they fall further behind on the scoreboard. It was pathetic. Ever since our fight a few weeks ago (though it was less of a fight, and more of a takedown) Steve had dropped the pretense that he was any match for me.

“Come on, pretty boy. Give me something I can fuckin work with,” I tease at him, tongue shooting out between my teeth.

He glares just as Coach Bowman shouts “Hargove!” from across the court. I’m expecting a reprimand for my choice of words, but instead he says, “Time for you to go, isn’t it?”

I glance at the clock and see 3:15pm, ten minutes before the end of practice. With one last look at Harrington, I turn to leave. “Yes, Coach it is.”

This morning I sought out Bowman, feigning a doctor's appointment of Max’s that she needed a ride to. Because of my talent on the court, and the possibility of the school winning a championship for a change, the coach was more than willing to let me out early on a Friday, as long as it meant I’d stay happy and on his team.

In actuality, I just wanted a chance to shower quickly, before the rest of the team crowded the locker room, and get the hell home before Neil’s shift ended. Last night I noticed two new bottles of whisky on the counter, probably dropped off by some work friend of Neil’s, and I had no intention of sticking around for the weekend to see what that much liquor would bring out of him. Instead, my plan was to shower here, stop home for some clothes, and spend tonight out at a party that that Tommy kid was throwing. Hopefully I’d land a chick, sleep off a hangover in her bed, then figure out my plan for the rest of my weekend tomorrow.

I head down the gym stairs to the locker room, grab some shampoo, a brush, and a bar of soap from my bag. I’d never put effort into my hair with the rest of the team down here, but that was part of the need for me to leave practice early- the chance to shower in a way that would actually have me looking good for the night, without having to spend extended time at home. I wish I could avoid going home at all, but I was late and in a rush this morning, meaning the jeans I thought I had packed were in fact Max’s denim jacket and, obviously, that wouldn’t cut it for a party.

Turning on the tap, I wince at the icy water. Back in California it would've been a blessing after sweating in a gym, but the basement of Hawkins High, where the locker room was located, had a dank chill, the result of an Indiana November. I begin scrubbing at my scalp with the shampoo and then brushing it out. There’s suddenly the sound of the rickety door opening, and I instinctively hide the hairbrush behind my back. There’s a russell of clothes being removed and then Harrington steps into the shower.

“Fuck’re you doing here, pretty boy? Couldn’t resist the chance to see me naked?”

He rolls his eyes. “You’re not the only one with an early pass.” He looks at me and smirks. “Sure are making a lot of jokes about me being a fairy when you’re the one holding a hair brush behind your back. What exactly were you doing with it anyway?”

I scowl. I don’t want to admit that I take any care in my appearance, but it’s less queer than what he’s implying. “Well look at that, the dethroned king speaks! Your silence has been boring me out of my mind.” I smile, too innocently. “I’m just cleaning up, Harrington. I plan on getting laid tonight and even though I don’t rely entirely on my hair to make girls want me,” I look at him pointedly, “I do still think it’s important to look presentable. But you know all about that, hm pretty boy?”

The water runs over Harrington's body, he doesn’t seem to be affected at all by the chill, or my words for that matter. He only grins. “And here they are calling me “The Hair,” if only they could see you.”

I’m torn over whether I’m pleased to have our banter back, or annoyed at the fact that he was maybe winning this particular round. “Keep making comments about my physical appearance, Princess, really helps your case.”

He frowns at that, but doesn’t respond. Good, I’m done with the conversation. I hear the rest of the team filing down the stairs, all laughter and complaints, signifying the end of practice. The whole point was to get to the house before Neil got home, and now I was running later than expected. In frustration, I turn off the faucet to my shower head and then, out of spite, shut off Harrington’s too. I see him suppress a sigh, but I only wink. “Later, pretty boy.”

\---

My Camaro skids into my driveway, AC/DC pouring from the speakers and out the open windows. Freezing winter or not, I could never resist driving with the windows down. The wind in my hair was the closest I’d get to ocean surf in this shitty little town. I pull my keys from the ignition, roll up the windows, and lock the doors. I’d only be inside for a few minutes, but I’d never risk leaving my one piece of freedom vulnerable to be taken from me.

I walk up the driveway. The door is already unlocked so I assume the kid is home instead of running around town with the rest of those shrill little brats. It’s a wonder that Harrington can stand to be around all of them at once to babysit.

The moment I open the door, Max is upon me. “Where’s my jacket?” she glares.

“Christ, speak of the devil.” I open my bag and toss a lump of denim at her. “I accidentally packed it this morning, don’t get your panties in a twist.”

Her glare deepens at that. “What were you packing for anyway?”

“Mind your business, kid.” I spit.

She looks at me, and a degree of recognition sparks in her eyes. “Are you spending the weekend away?” Her eyes flit to the counter, where the liquor sits.

“Yeah, kid now get out of my way.” I push past her, but not before I see relief on her face. Neil doesn’t lay a hand on her, so with me out of the house, she might get through a weekend without violence- the physical inflicted on me, and the resulting anger that pools off me when I speak to her. Ever since that night I fought with Harrington, I had been putting more effort than usual into not being a dick to my step-sister. There was something about the way that she and those other kids feared me, believed that I had come to hurt them, that didn’t sit right with me. I wouldn’t say I was treating her kindly, or even well, but she seemed somewhat less tense when I walked in a room now. It was even easier to lay off Max when I could pick on Harrington. Hopefully he’d snap out of this pacifist bullshit he’d been on recently and push back a little, like today in the locker room. I smile to myself, maybe if he knew it was for Max’s sake, Harrington’d throw a few punches. He seems to care for those kids, my sister included.

I open my bedroom door, enter, and throw a few things in my duffle bag- a toothbrush and some comfortable clothes for later, just the things I had missed this morning. I’m just changing from the clothes I wore to school into jeans and a red, short sleeve button down when I hear another car park outside the house.

“Just… fuck.” I mutter. I got caught up teasing pretty boy in that bathroom and now I’d be paying for it. The house's front door opens, boots stomp into the entryway, keys clatter on the counter, and a seal snaps on a bottle of whisky. I really was planning to avoid him today, and now I feel a pit in my stomach even worse than if I had been expecting the altercation. I put on a couple chains and an earring in one ear, grab my duffle bag, and exit my bedroom. It’ll be better if I get out now, before that whisky has a chance to metabolize.

Neil sits in his recliner, the bottle in one hand. He hadn’t even bothered to put it in a glass. His eyes narrow as I come into his view.

“Hello, father.” I say, not meeting his eye. There are days when I can put up more of a fight, look him in the eye and stand my ground, hold onto a shred of dignity. But christ, today I just want this over with.

“Our driveway fits one car, you little shit. One.”

I didn’t think I’d be here long enough for him to have to park at the curb. “I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

He sighs. He likes it better when I fight back, likes seeing the spark of hatred in my eyes and how it dies out the more punches he throws. “Now I had to park on the side of the road. At my own fucking house. Does that seem fair to you?” he spits. He’s on his feet now, walking towards me. “Does it seem fair that after you leave, I will then have to repark my car?”

“No sir.” I mutter.

He’s only a few inches away from me now, and his eyes level with mine. His hand clutches around my throat, squeezing tightly. “You wanna speak up?” his voice hasn’t started to slur yet, but his breath still stings my nostrils as the scent of liquors wafts over me.

“No sir.” I try to say it louder this time, so he’ll just let me fucking go, but with his hand around my throat, it comes out quieter instead. He moves his hand up, so that it grasps around my jaw now instead. I can almost hear it creak in protest.

He spits on my face. “Worthless, you.” With that, the punches begin raining down. My fists clench with the urge to hit back as his knuckles impact my chest, my cheek, my stomach. I try to take it standing up as long as I can, but before long I’m huddled on the ground. Pathetic. Weak. He gives a final kick to my ribs and then leans down next to my ear. “Go. Repark. My. Fucking. Car.”


	2. Man of Wealth and Taste

_And that was me getting off easy I think to myself._ I had to button up my shirt one button higher than I usually would because of a particularly prominent boot print bruised onto my abdomen. The black and blue splotches that litter my cheek, my jaw, and my chest are okay. I have no issue with all of Hawkins thinking that I got into a fight, the boot print just gives away too easily that I didn’t win- that there wasn’t even a fight at all, that I had fallen to the ground. 

On the passenger side next to me sits two of the six beers that I had picked up at a gas station about fifteen minutes after I had gotten up from the linoleum of my kitchen, scooped up my keys and Neil’s, and put my car on the roadside and his in the driveway. I would’ve given anything to then have just sped away in mine, but instead I had to walk back inside and place Neil’s keys neatly back on the entryway table. The moment I had exited my house for the last time this weekend, I stomped to my car, slammed open the door, put my music on full volume, and set out to get far, far from Neil. 

Beer was the first step- a six pack of Schlitz cans, four of which are now drained, the aluminum crushed and in the back of the Camaro, scattered around a bottle of rum I had also snagged at the gas station. I preferred whisky, taste wise, but I couldn’t bring myself to be around the smell of it tonight, not when my nostrils were still burning from Neil’s breath. I feel more than hear the pop on the fifth one as I open the seal, my new Ratt cassette playing too loudly for much else to be heard. It’s on it’s sixth loop through my sound system, Round and Round swarming my ears just as it did thirty-seven minutes ago, and thirty-seven minutes before that. 

I couldn’t just go directly to Tommy’s house. The party didn’t start til 9:30, plus I’d be damned if I showed any earlier than 10, and Neil’s arrival home from work left with me with an unfortunate five hours to kill. Even between driving aimlessly, grabbing shitty diner food, and a liquor run, I still have a solid hour and fifteen of time to bide. I have pent up energy, adrenaline still shooting through my body, wanting to hit something, a surrogate. Pressing my foot to the gas and taking turns a little too sharp helps, but I don’t have enough money to fund much more aimless driving. 

I pull into the lot of an old building, abandoned probably. I don’t know what they’d expect, no business would do well out in the middle of nowhere like this one was, especially with the rumors about a new mall being built. I turn off the car’s engine, and settle back into my seat, closing my eyes. I bring the beer up to my lips as I take another long pull from the can. 

Christ, how do people survive in small shithole towns like this one? There are so many hours in each day and I don’t have the slightest clue how residents spend them. Maybe some wile away hours in their homes, playing video games or watching television with their families. I know some boys from the team get together after school to play basketball for fun, without the pressure of winning or competition. I’ve considered joining them in the past, but Harrington doesn’t play there, and I’m not afraid to admit that a significant portion of the sports appeal is a chance to rip on him. Plus, I’ve never been one for friends. Too much recreational time with people and they start expecting to know things about you. 

_Friends._ I think. _That’s how these people stand it._ My brain travels to Max and her crew, the way they go from arcades to each other's house, to rarely-traveled roads to skate and ride bikes on and to fields to do whatever it is that middle schoolers do. I don’t like that the people she’s decided to keep in her company are a bunch of boys. 

_Well, and that quiet girl with the short hair_ my brain interjects, but I brush the thought aside. Boring town or not, I have enough on my mind without idling on that little freak who hangs around. I dislike her presence around my step-sister with equal fervor as I do those boys. 

A police cruiser passes the lot, not going slow enough to notice my car here, especially with the lights off and the cover of night. Still I throw my leather jacket over the mess of cans. If for some reason that cop Hopper does catch sight of my car at any point tonight, I don’t want to give him anything to run back and tell my father, which is what he does for most people in the area instead of making actual arrests. I wish he knew that, for some of us, that display of kindness was actually one of cruelty, depending on the father in question. 

It’s 9:45 now, I’ve killed a good chunk of time sitting here. I light a cigarette and crack my window, throwing the car on and into reverse and peeling out of the lot. I’m a solid half hour away from Tommy’s house, but that time will be cut in half with the way I drive. 

I don’t particularly like Tommy, or know him really. But any enemy of Harrington’s is a friend of mine, and I can’t say I don’t feel smug at the way he worships me instead of him now. I’ve convinced myself it’s because I’m stronger, more masculine and tough than Harrington, and not just because Tommy’s pea brain decides to bow down to whoever can do a respectable keg stand. 

The party is in full swing when I arrive, small town dwellers apparently feel less of a need to show up fashionably late and more of a need to get drunk and start dancing as soon as they are able. My final beer downed on the way here, I now grip the handle of rum, sweat-slick in my hand as I weave my way through my classmates. Hawkins High doesn’t have a very large class size, but in a small suburban living room, it feels a lot larger. 

There’s calls of “Hey, Hargrove” as I pass through the crowd, but all are in greeting, not flagging me down. I find a wall to lean against and open my rum, taking a sip, letting the liquor make my lips sticky and my throat and chest warm. 

I look good tonight, not in spite of the bruises, but because of them. A blond curl trails from my forehead to my cheekbone, blending right into the most noticeable patch of blue. My lips are red and there’s a sheen of sweat over my face from the close quarters of the party, and my muscles are visible beneath the sleeves of my shirt. I know my plan for the evening won’t take long to enact, and I’m right. A girl with shoulder length reddish hair, green bambi eyes, and, most importantly, a tiny skirt, materializes at my side.

“Mixing it up again, Hargrove?” Her voice is gravely, sexy. 

“Some people just don’t know what’s good for them, and I’m an excellent teacher.” I reply, a smirk crawling it’s way up my face. It hurts the bruises to smile, but I don’t let it show. 

“Michelle.” The girl extends her hand towards me.

Instead of shaking it, I take it in my own and lead her away from the wall and into the dancing throng of teenagers. “Your name isn’t what I’d like to be introduced to.”

With my free hand, I guide her waist towards me so that her back is against my chest, a cigarette puffing in my mouth. I run my hand slowly up to her ribcage and back down to her hip as she grinds herself into me. I ignore the pain of her spine pressing into bruised skin and instead focus on the pleasure of her ass against my jeans. The music isn’t great, Springstein instead of Scorpions, but my brain is getting fuzzy from the beers and the liquor, my blood buzzes from nicotine, and I have an almost guaranteed lay for the night, if Michelle’s enthusiastic hips are any indication. I have distraction, which is what I’ve been aching for since this afternoon with my father, since last Friday, since I came to Hawkins, since I turned eight and started looking less like a child and more like a punching bag. 

“Any chance you’d like to take this upstairs?” Michelle whispers in my ear, her teeth nipping at my neck as she pulls away. 

“I need to step outside for just a minute, but why don’t you head up and wait for me.” I say with a quick hit to her ass. Those beers have to come out at some point, best to handle it now. 

“Okay.” She smiles at me seductively. “Second door on the left.” 

I watch as she slinks up the stairs, then I head out the back door into Tommy’s yard. I stamp out my cigarette and feed a stick of gum into my mouth instead. There’s a keg, and some kids begin beckoning me towards it. “Just taking a leak, boys. I’ve got something better to put my mouth on waiting upstairs, try it sometime.”

Some laugh at my words, others pretend not to look hurt. I’m sure none of them were entirely happy when I moved here, shooting them even further down on the Hawkins girl’s list of boys they’d let in their pants. 

I relieve myself just past the first line of trees, my back turned away from those milling in the yard. A roar erupts and shouts of “Harrington!” and “King Steve!” filter to wear I’m standing. I zip my jeans and lick my lips. _Finally. Some fucking excitement._

“Well, look which pretty pretty princess came out of his tower to play with the peasants tonight.” I jeer as I exit the woods. It’s obvious that I’ve surprised him by the way his grin falters ever so slightly. He clearly didn’t know I was here. 

He recovers quickly, however. “Come on, Hargrove, don’t you ever get tired of… overcompensating?” His eyes flit down to my jeans and back up to my face, grinning.  
The crowd laughs a little and I allow them, letting a smile rest on my face instead of scowling at the comment. “I haven’t received any complaints.” My expression turns more devilish. “And didn’t the only person who could give you a review dump you for that Byers kid?”

Harrington isn’t as good as I am at hiding the blow to his ego and his face darkens, fists clenching. I keep going- he’s close to wanting to hit me, I can feel it. “You must have a pretty meager downstairs if that Wheeler bitch would take a freak like Byers over you.” 

Pretty boy’s cheeks flush red, partially in embarrassment, but mostly, it seems, in anger. _Fuckin finally._ “You are such an ass, Hargrove. No wonder you’ve got new bruises every week, you never know when to shut up.” 

He’s not entirely wrong. Oftentimes my mouth leads to me being worse off with my father, but again, I refuse to let Harrington see he’s wounded me. The same way I’ve covered my boot print bruise with an extra button, I cover my discomfort at his words with a scoff. “So you gonna shut me up, or what, your highness?” 

He charges at me and I almost laugh with glee as the adrenaline still lingering in my veins reawakens, hungry for the outlet currently barrelling in this direction. There’s a sense of impact as our bodies collide. Harrington has attempted to get enough speed to knock me to the ground, to gain the upper hand, but he’s not who he was before I arrived in Hawkins, not the king that everyone thought he was. 

Instead, the jolt sends him ricocheting an inch or two backwards. As he recovers, I wind my arm back for a punch. My knuckles connect with his jaw and I hear a crunch. I didn’t hit him hard enough to break anything, but the onlookers still let out excited shrieks at the fight, at my successful blow. Harrington is hunched over now and I take the opportunity to take him to the ground, my legs straddling his hips as I use my other fist to hit the other side of his face. 

It feels so good, so unbelievably fucking good to hit something, someone, and to feel Harrington’s heaving body below me. All of the anger I feel, at my mother for leaving me, at my father for hitting me, at Max for making us move to this shithole, boils through me, eager to make its way out.

I’m closer to pretty boy’s face now, about to hit him again, when his voice hits my ear. “Enjoying yourself, faggot?” 

My blood, which only a moment ago was red hot, runs cold. _So that’s why you’ve been staring at yourself in the mirror like some faggot._ Neil’s words flood my brain and it takes me a few seconds to understand that the hits I suddenly feel to my cheek aren’t Neil as well. In the short time of my distraction, Harrington has managed to switch our positions, and now I’m getting back everything I gave to him, tenfold. 

_Flip him off you, move him, you pussy._ I think. But it takes another second for me to take my brain's command. Steve has thrown me with his words. Finally he’s back under me and it’s rage, pain, fury, not enjoyment now, behind my punch that knocks the dethroned king out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alrighty folks, we're in the enemies portion of this fic, but don't worry, we'll progress past it. I'm hoping the weird aggression Billy feels for Steve is coming across as homo-erotic as I'm intending. ALSO that the parallels between Neil's treatment of Billy and Billy's treatment of steve are obvious. K, there will be a new chapter in the next couple days. Peace.


	3. Moment of Doubt and Pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I'm really knocking these chapters out so that's unexpected for me, considering I haven't written anything besides essays for the last like 7 years. Anyway, leave a comment to let me know what you think so far about the writing/the plot. It'll get cuter soon!!! I just want to make sure it's set up in a way where Billy is redeemable, yet realistic. Also I might do a few chapters from Harrington's perspective but I havent decided, lemme know.

The thing about a plan is that sticking to it is what yields results. Diverting from a plan and punching someone until they pass out, while simultaneously leaving a very sexy girl waiting so long that she goes to seek out a boy that _isn’t_ being taken away in a police cruiser, can mean that you suddenly don’t have a sleeping arrangement for the weekend. Now I was sleeping in the Camaro, in the same lot I’d parked in before the party. Funny how that works.

It didn’t take Harrington very long to wake up, but that didn’t stop some nosey bitch at the party from calling Hopper to come check out the situation. When he arrived he took one look at pretty boy, then huffed. “First Byers and now Hargrove. When is this kid not getting his face broken.”

A better question would have been “When is this kid not being a prick?” but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to piss off the chief and give him any incentive to tell my father. I felt small. Harrington had gotten more punches in then I intended on allowing, and now I had to kiss ass so a cop would take it easy on me- two strikes against my reputation, both in front of an audience. 

Hopper had put me in the backseat and a woozy Harrington in the front. “Let me take you boys home. Billy, you first. I’ll get to you after, Steve.” Harrington only moaned in response. 

Time for strike three of the night, this one even worse than the first two, even though the only witness was Harrington instead of the entirety of the class. I cleared my throat. “I would prefer to go to the station, Chief, than for you to take me home.”

He looked at me questioningly from the rearview mirror and took the cigarette from his mouth. “Just let me tell your old man and you can move on. No need for this to go on your record, I want all you kids to have enough chance at a future to get out of this town and leave me the hell alone.” 

I tried to keep the pleading from my voice. “The station, chief. Please.” 

Harrington perked up a little more at that, his eyes as confused as Hoppers. 

After making eye contact with me in the mirror, the chief had simply nodded. Harrington looked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t. We pulled into a driveway and Hopper had supported Steve as the two of them walked to the door. 

I yawn now, my hand hitting the window of the Camaro as I attempt to stretch my muscles, stiff from three nights of sleeping in such a small space. I’ll go back home this afternoon, now that Neil’s weekend bender has probably winded to a close. I don’t miss home, but I sure as all fuck miss my bed. The sun is what woke me up this morning. It hasn’t the past two, what with the alcohol driven stupor I put myself in, but it appears enough of it has left my system that my body is back to it’s normal sleep schedule. 

School doesn’t start for another hour or so, so I roll down my window and light a cigarette. It’s cold as shit so I turn the car on too, the radio turning on with it- Run to the Hills, Iron Maiden. I close my eyes and turn up the volume. 

Hopper had taken me to the station, like I requested, but nothing ended up on my record. Instead he seemed wary. “Looks like the Harrington kid got a few hits in.” he had said. 

I had only nodded. 

“Funny, the kids at the party said he only got you in the face, but you have quite the display on your chest as well.” He looked at me through narrowed eyes, puffing his cigarette. 

I ignored his words, instead asked, “Could I get one of those?”

Wordlessly, he passed me the box. I pulled a cigarette out with my teeth and took my own lighter from my pocket. He looked on at me, working something out in his head. “I’m not too naive to know what’s going on here,” he had said. 

I stayed silent. He pressed on. “You don’t want me to tell your dad anything about tonight and your chest is covered in bruises that, frankly, I don’t think the Harrington boy is capable of,” he considered my face. “That one on your cheekbone, too.” 

I couldn’t meet his eyes after that. “It’s fine, chief. Plenty of fathers do this to plenty of sons.”

He winced. “Not quite like that.” 

After another long moment, Hopper said, “I’ll tell you what. You stop beating the shit out of Harrington at every chance you get- don’t think I don’t know about a few weeks ago, with you breaking that plate over his head and pummelling his face half to death- and I’ll keep this off your record and away from your father.” 

“Seems more than fair, sir.” I had said. Even though I had gotten off, I hated that it was out of pity. 

We had both gotten up to leave, so he could drive me to my car (somehow it had eluded him that alcohol was at all involved in the night’s events and he was letting me drive home, not that that’s where I was going) when he stopped short. “Your sister, Maxine. She… does he… hurt her?”

I didn’t bother to correct him, on Max’s name or the forgotten word “step” before “sister”. “No sir. Never her.” 

He hadn’t seemed satisfied with that, but let it go for the moment. After an awkward ride back to Tommy’s house where my car was parked, all Hopper said before he left me at the door to my Camaro was, “Tell someone, kid. A friend.” 

There was that word again. Friend. That in itself was the problem. I don’t have friends, and more importantly, I don’t want them. I have a town full of girls to make my way through and I liquor store that takes a fake. Plus, the chief of police knows, who the fuck else needs to. 

The sun is rising higher in the sky so I twist my body to rustle around the backseat, eventually unearthing a toothbrush and an almost empty cup of water from the only fast food joint in town. I set about brushing my teeth, putting some cologne on my wrists and spraying deodorant under my arms. It’s a poor substitute for a shower, but it’ll do. With any luck, my disheveled appearance will make my weekend seem more interesting- hell, maybe the townies will think I spent a couple days in the county jail for fighting with Harrington. 

Harrington. I hate that he heard me ask Hopper to take me to the station. I hate that he hit me, that he called me a fag- that he sounded exactly like my father when he did it. I hate that I’ll have to see him at practice. Maybe I whacked his brain around enough that he won’t remember Friday night. It’s unlikely, but the thought brings me the tiniest bit of comfort. 

The day goes by quickly. The drive to school, classes, lunch, all blur together. I’m just so tired. Practice, however, makes an impression. Harrington is notably absent, and from the coach’s annoyed look, it wasn’t approved. 

I don’t play my best. I tell myself it’s the fatigue, but there’s also the fact that there’s no competition when my rival isn’t here. Coach yells at me three times to get my head in the game, and god if that isn’t just one more thing to hate Harrington for: even not around, he’s making my life harder. 

I shower longer than the other boys on the team. Tommy grins at me. “Why so fussy, got a hot date tonight, Hargrove?” 

I grin and crack my gum, but don’t say anything, knowing he’ll take it as a yes. 

Really it’s just my first time feeling clean in days. I pull my clothes back over my body, the bruises from my father and Harrington alike already beginning to fade. 

When I arrive at my car, belongings in hand, ready to finally sleep, I see Harrington leaning against my rear bumper. My promise to Hopper to stop trying to actively kill pretty boy circles in my head and I force myself not to grab the collar of his jacket and launch him across the school lot. 

“Get your ass back to your Beamer and off my car, princess,” I practically spit at him. 

He looks taken aback, not getting my usual teasing purr that he was expecting. Nevertheless, he stands up. “Um. Hi.”

_What the fuck was this._ “Cut the pleasantries, I’m not in the mood. What do you want, an apology?”

Again, surprise registers on his face. “Um. No. I- why would you-” he falters. 

“Spit it out, sweetheart, or I’m getting in and reversing over you.”

He looks annoyed now, but manages to push the damn sentence off his lips. “Why would you take an arrest over being let off easy?”

_We have a different idea of easy._ I scoff. “Let’s not stick our nose where it doesn’t belong, huh Harrington?” I push past him and unlock and open my door, but he pushes it back closed. Okay, now I’m killing him, deal with Hopper aside. “Watch it.” I glare at him. 

He combs his fingers through his hair and looks into my eyes. “I know… what he does to you. It’s not hard to figure out.”

I freeze. I tell myself he only knows because of what he heard me ask Hopper. Nobody else has figured it out, I’m sure. Then again, Harrington is a Grade-A idiot and _he_ picked up on it. 

My face turns into a mask, one that’s calm, bored even. “Not a clue what you’re talking about. Can I go home now?” 

“... Home?” He really looks confused now. “Maybe… maybe don’t go back there.”

I’m a second away from losing it. Through my teeth I say, “Listen, _King_ Steve. I know that you live in that big ol house all by yourself since Mommy and Daddy probably can’t stand to be around you, God knows why, but our lives are different, okay? So yes. I’m going _home._ ” 

I reach for my door again, but he grabs my wrist this time, lightly. “You are such a dick,” he says but now there’s pity in his eyes and I actually want to gouge them out. I go to twist my wrist away to do just that, but he tightens his grip. “You don’t have to go back, you can-” 

“Fuck. OFF.” I scream into his face. It startles him enough for him to drop his grip and with that I extend my hand towards the door a third time, actually succeed in getting it all the way open and myself inside this time around, and speed away, barely avoiding running over Harrington’s toes. 

I’m still seething with rage when I get home. I turn my speakers up as loud as they’ll go and begin to scream, my nails digging into my scalp. Tears come out of my eyes from the force of my vocal chords. Harrington now saw me as weak. As someone to feel bad for. The one person I could always count on to rough up and now he’d probably let me, as some consolation prize for a shitty life. 

Suddenly, there's a loud bang on my door. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and shout, “The fuck do you want?” 

Max’s voice responds. “Can I come in, Billy?”

Something clicks in my head. Of course Harrington didn’t figure out my situation on his own, not with that dumbass head of his. No, of course not. 

“Come on in, Max!” I shout back, madness creeping into my voice just a little. 

She walks in, cautiously. “I saw you were back. Just wanted to check in that-”

“Did you tell your little boyfriend anything about me?” I begin walking towards her.

She looks bewildered. “What? I-”

My fingers place themselves around her jaw, not squeezing, just making sure she’s looking me in the eye. “Did. You tell. Your sticky little friends. Something about my private life? Something that they maybe, I don’t know, passed along to that creepy babysitter of theirs?”

“Who, Steve? No… no I didn’t tell them anything, Billy, I swear. What’re you talking about?”

My grip tightens ever so slightly and her eyes fill with tears. “Billy you promised, you promised no more hurting me and my friends. You promised. 

I look at her. The fear in her eyes, the quiver of her lip. I let go. It’s not her that I want to hurt. God, what the fuck was I thinking. 

She takes a step back from me. “What does Steve know, Billy? About… about Neil or? I swear I didn’t say a word, I know I’m not supposed to.” 

“No,” I say. “No, just about some stuff I have in a drawer, I thought you were snooping.”

She doesn’t look convinced.

“Just go Max. I’m sor- I shouldn’t have touched you. Just go, I’m-.”

“It’s fine, Billy. Everything’s fine.” 

\---

The week goes by quietly. Harrington and I keep our distance from each other at practice. A girl at school, Lisa, starts up a conversation with me a few times. I repair a spindle on the staircase and my father places his hand on my shoulder, the closest I ever get to an “I love you,” and says “Thank you, son. This is what I’ve been talking about: respect and responsibility.” I’m still pretty sure that Max is at fault for Harrington’s knowledge of my situation, but I force down any feelings of anger towards her with all that I can. 

Susan is home every night to cook dinner. Maybe Max expressed some degree of concern about me after my Monday afternoon outburst and the healing bruises on my body, or maybe it’s just sheer coincidence. Regardless, things are somewhat peaceful.

By Friday night, a week after the last time Neil has touched me, I feel almost at ease. I have a date with Lisa planned for tomorrow and her parents are out of town on business, meaning her house is empty. Max is with her friends and my dad and Susan are out somewhere. I spent a solid hour of my evening alone, working out, starting with lifting free weights while sitting on my bed and, by the end of the hour, pressing plate weights in the living room. 

I felt happy, in that moment. Not surfing in California with my old friends happy, not living with my mom happy, but listening to Metallica and not feeling like shit about who I was for the first time in weeks happy. 

It’d be good to get out of the house with the mood that I’m in, but I don’t have enough money for gas and I need to save what little is left in the Camaro’s tank to get to school come Monday. Susan slips me ten or so dollars every couple weeks, probably for all the rides (and childcare, frankly) that I provide for Max, though I’ve been seeing her less and less recently. Hopefully that doesn’t affect my arrangement with Susan. Though I’ll admit, it’s been nice to not be responsible for Max in addition to everything else in my life. 

Instead, I lay on my bed, Motley Crue beating against my ears from the headphones of my walkman, and flick through a Playboy I picked up on my last liquor run- an issue from a month or two ago with a blonde in grey calvins on the cover, her matching grey top resting right above the bottom of her breasts. Unintentionally, I fall asleep, my body interpreting the peace I feel as a safe time to rest. 

_I feel Harrington’s body underneath mine, writhing, my left hand pinning both of his above his head, my right clasped around his throat, squeezing tighter and tighter._

__

__

_“Say you’re sorry, pretty boy.” I trace my tongue across my upper lip._

__

__

_“Please get off of me. Can’t you see it hurts, please let go,” he pleads with me. I frown. Where’s the teasing, the attempt to push me off?_

__

__

_“Come on, princess. Say it.”_

__

__

_“Yes sir,” he whimpers, but it’s not his voice leaving his parting lips but my own. In his shining eyes I see my reflection- no. Neil’s reflection._

I wake with a start to the feeling of my headphones being yanked off my ears. “Christ,” I shout in alarm.

A hand squeezes my jaw tightly, and spit sprays my ear as Neil’s voice replaces my music. “There is a beer missing from my refrigerator,” he growls. 

I’m disoriented. What the fuck was going on, what time was it? Only pale moonlight came in between my window shades. “Fuck, I dunno, you probably forgot you drank it,” I splutter. 

His lip curls and he slams my head back. “What did you just say to me, boy?” 

The jolt to my head has me fully awake now and I’m angry. I can’t be happy for a fucking hour in this house. “I said YOU fucking drank it.” I shout back. 

It happens quickly- Neil’s spare hand reaches to my floor, lifting something from the ground. In an instant, it bashes against my temple. It’s cold metal; the free weight I was lifting earlier. An involuntary cry escapes me, high pitched and pathetic. I hear footsteps approaching. 

“Back to bed, Susan. I’m handling my son.” 

I can’t see. Not just from the darkness, but from dizziness, from blood flowing into my eye. His attention whips back to me. “Stay out of my fridge and keep your hands off what’s not yours.” With those final words his hand releases me harshly and the free weight drops to the floor. My door slams shut and I hear his muffled words. “If either of you go in to check on him, so help me god…” He doesn’t finish the threat, but neither Susan nor Max have to speculate about what he’s capable of. The house goes quiet. I’ve been left alone.

I sob, unable to stop the hot tears from flowing down my face. I can barely breathe or keep my eyes open, the gash is so painful. I carefully take off the sock I’m wearing and press it to the wound. It can’t be sanitary but I can’t do anything else to stop the blood. Not stand up to find a first aid kit, not leave the house and beg for help, not even find a cleaner fabric to put to my head. Rather than doing anything to help myself, I put my headphones back into place, restart my cassette, and burrow down in the blankets, placing a hand over my mouth to conceal the weeps that continue to escape me, unable to care what the injury could do to me in my sleep.


	4. What's Puzzling You Is the Nature of my Game

A hand strokes my arm, starting at the shoulder and working its way to my elbow in slow, almost nonexistent movements. It’s the only sensation I feel in the entirety of my body that isn’t agonizing. It takes me a moment to open my eyes. Red hair comes into focus first, and then a pale face, sick with concern.

“Hey there, Mad Max.” The words come out of my mouth slurred and rough. 

She doesn’t respond, just keeps soothingly rubbing my arm. I realize that it’s not just worry on her face, but anger. 

“Don’t waste your energy being mad at him, I promise you it doesn’t fix anything,” I say. I think my words are audible, but the ringing in my ears makes it hard to tell.

“I’m mad at _you,_ ” she says. 

That’s usually warranted, but I’ll admit that it seems a little out of place when I have blood crusted on my forehead. “Fuck’d I do?” The words all garble together in my mouth.

“You’re hurt and I know that you won’t let me call someone to drive you to a hospital or tell anybody what’s happening to you.” She glowers. “Or even let me help.” 

She’s right about the first two, there’s no way in hell that one more person is finding out about this. I look up at her. “If I let you fix up my head, will you stop being mad at me?”

“No,” she says. But she smiles. 

It feels almost like old times between us, what with me and her sat in the same room, her unafraid of me, and me not being aggressive towards her. It’s like California, years ago, when we were finally getting accustomed to our place in each other's lives, when we were not quite friends, but allies at least. 

Max brings a warm, damp cloth up to my temple and I wince at the sting. “Baby,” she mutters, with a sarcastic sneer. I glare back at her, the same playfulness in my expression, then cringe again at the pain of contorting my face. 

“Do you think you’re concussed or something?” She asks. 

I think for a moment. “Uh, how would I know?”

“When this girl at school, Stephanie, got hit in the head with a baseball in gym, she like, threw up. And then fainted.” 

I smile a little at the weird, excited way she tells me this. At what age do we stop taking so much pleasure in telling a silly story from school? “I don’t feel like I’m gonna puke, so there’s that. My ears won’t shut up though.”

“Does your head hurt?” She asks, as she continues to dab at my skin. 

I actually laugh at that. “No, no. Feels even better than normal.” 

She shoots me a look. “Fine. Just asking.”

Even though I evaded her question with a joke, I almost want to tell her how hard my head is pounding. From the way she looks at me, though, I think she knows. “I could ask Dustin about concussions. He’s really smart, all of my friends are. They’d probably know something, I could phrase it hypothetically-” 

I try to keep anger from flooding my voice. “You don’t need to, Max.” The words come out too sharply. “I swear, I’m alright,” I say, softer. 

She looks smug for a moment. “Maybe don’t drive for a few days, until we know you’re not gonna like, have a seizure or something.” 

I’m struggling to figure out why she has the look on her face that she does when she says, “And that means no date tonight.” 

\---

Lisa was understanding when I called to cancel our date, if not a brusk. Between her and Michelle from last Friday, I wasn’t handling the girls of Hawkins with my usual suave. I’ll have to do some damage control before word gets out that I’ve left two girls hanging in just over a week. 

It wasn’t necessary to cancel, I could’ve ignored Max’s request- Lord knows I didn’t need to be taking orders from a dick of an old man _and_ a middle schooler- but the pain in my skull was enough to make me want to stay low for a day or two anyway. 

The morning wiles away with my father and Susan nowhere to be found. Max, who said she didn’t sleep at all last night, tells me that they left around eight, Neil to do some job at his coworker’s house, and Susan to breakfast and a shopping trip with her friend. 

I lounge on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep as Max watches television in Neil’s recliner. She was on the other end of the couch with me at first, but by noon she manages to convince herself that I’m not going to die spontaneously and moves locations. We eat chips for lunch. We don’t talk much.

Maybe she’s trying not to disturb me, but I can’t help but feel like she’s too nervous to talk to me, like whatever she says will break the spell of our peace, and I’ll suddenly yell at her, like usual. Or maybe, worse, she doesn’t want to talk to me, the tenderness she showed when cleaning my wound this morning a fluke, and will never truly like me after the way I’ve made her feel the past year or so. I’m not brave enough to ask. 

I’ve retired to my room by the time Neil does get home, not wanting to see him, or for him to see me. I overhear him speak to Max though. “How was your day, kid?”

“Good. I did some homework and hung out with Billy.”

I don’t miss the confusion in Neil’s voice. “... Hung out?”

I can almost see her lift her chin, her tone defiant, but not enough to be disrespectful. “Yes. Hung out. He’s a very good… brother. Very _responsible._ ” 

I can’t make out what Neil says to that, but a few minutes later, my door cracks open, and a pack of Marlboro Reds land on my floor. I think it’s an apology. 

The tears that threaten to spill over my eyes aren’t from pain. 

\---

I’m late to school on Monday, delayed from digging in my room to find sunglasses to protect my head from aching any worse than it already does. I manage to charm the school secretary into giving me a pass for this afternoon’s practice, though, something not usually allowed for tardy students. Most tardy students, however, don’t have the ability to charm a woman into complacency with just a wink and a smirk, a purring voice. 

As practice time rolls around, I almost wish I hadn’t bothered, though. With every hour that passed today, the fluorescent lighting made it harder and harder to keep my eyes open, like it was pressing on a bruise right behind the sockets. 

In the locker room, Harrington appears at my side, just as I’m slipping my shirt over my head. “Hey, Hargrove. Didn’t see you out this weekend.” His tone is teasing, almost following the script that we’ve built over the past month, but there’s a hint of caution there too.

I follow his lead, trying to knock any lingering pity for me out of his head. “Aw, keeping a special eye out for me, princess? Weekend just isn’t the same when you’re not getting the shit beat out of you?”

“Eh it’s not the punching I like, it’s the straddling, actually.” 

Harrington grins at my shocked face, knowing I wasn’t expecting him to go along with my persistent joke. I’m pulling my hair out from under the collar of my shirt, when the smile slips off of him, his eyes landing on my temple. “Billy.” 

_Fuck._ The motion of fixing my hair must've interrupted the perfect placement of the curl I had arranged over my cut before I left this morning. “Just an accident from weight-lifting, pretty boy. They’re common for people who actually work on their muscles,” I say, attempting to return to the banter. 

There’s a shout from the top of the stairs. “Will all of you pansies get your asses up here. We have a game to practice for, or don’t you remember?”

With the distraction of the coach’s order and the shuffle of players heading upstairs, I manage to slip away from Harrington. 

If just sitting through classes was painful, then running around on the court is excruciating, hellish. The ball is stolen from me again and again and Bowman is shouting at me. “Pull it the fuck together, Hargrove, or I’m starting Steve instead of you on Wednesday.” 

I push myself harder, gaining control of the ball, and dribbling down the court as quickly as my body let’s me. I can feel my heartbeat, loudly, at every pulsepoint. I’m trying to get past Harrington, trying to fake him out so I can dunk, when the world goes blurry and I hit the ground. 

_She, like, threw up. And then fainted._ Max’s words play in my head. No, no, I haven’t fainted, just fallen. My ears are ringing so loudly that I can’t hear much else, but I see a few of my teammates’ lips moving, mouthing my name. 

When my vision is clear enough to stand, I get up and storm through the gym’s door that leads outside the building, into the parking lot, ignoring the now audible shouts of Bowman and the other boys. 

I march to my car and get inside, closing the door so harshly behind myself that the sound echoes, ricochets off the school’s bricks. My forehead leans against the steering wheel, hands gripping the leather so tightly that my knuckles turn white. 

Harrington punching me, me being compliant with Hopper, the girls I had stood up, my lack of an outing this weekend, and now, falling to my knees at practice; I can feel the whole town figuring out how weak I am. 

I swallow hard to prevent myself from crying and flick on the radio. Elton John’s voice croons out from the speakers, “... I’m still standing, better than I ever did.” I bark out a laugh, short and bitter, and practically punch the music back off, the irony of that damn song threatening to make my tears reappear. I don’t know how long I sit there, hunched over, unable to drive, forcing myself to calm down, to not think about Neil, or how my classmates thought of me, or what my mother would think if she could see me now. My mother. 

There’s a knock at my window and I jump in my seat, startled. Harrington is there. _Of fucking course I think._

“Before you flip me off or shout at me to go away, can I promise you this isn’t a lecture?”

I keep my head down. 

“I won’t look at you like you’re a homeless puppy either. Just open the window.” 

I scowl, then do as he says. I don’t know why, I guess just a lack of strength to fight back. 

He gives a small smile and lifts his arm. It’s holding my school bag and gym duffle. “You left your stuff.” 

“And you took it upon yourself to return it to me because, what, you’re a kind leader to us lowly peasants?” The words shoot out of me, even though the ones that wanted to escape were “Thank you,”- were “Why are you being kind to me?” 

He rolls his eyes slightly. “Can’t have my subjects revolting against me.” He frowns. “Not that I’m much of a King anymore anyway.” He thrusts my belongings at me and I take them.

Even though the exchange is over, Harrington stays next to my car, looking conflicted. I stare back at him, ready to shout if he goes back on his promise of not pitying me. Finally, he looks as if he’s come to a decision and his hand reaches for something that I hadn’t realized was propped against my car. “It’s not my business what kind of… situation you’re in. But, well, you might need to defend yourself sometime, and I… well.” He looks sheepish. “Take this.”

He hands me a bat with nails sticking out from all angles around the top. Almost immediately, I recognize it as the one Max slammed between my legs the night that she yelled at me to leave her and her friends alone, the night that I almost killed Harrington. 

“And you’d like me to defend myself with a weapon that looks like it was crafted by a twelve year old to beat up the monster under their bed?”

A sly smile spreads across his face at that. “Don’t underestimate what it can do to a monster.” 

I look at him questioningly. “If I take this will you get away from my car?”

He hands it to me through the window and I toss it into the backseat. “Just one more thing,” he says. His cheeks are red and he almost looks a little afraid. A slip of paper leaves his hand and drops into mine. 

“Aw, giving me your number, sweethea-” I begin, but his back is already turned, walking away from me hurriedly. 

I unfold the slip and look at the messy scrawl. _In case you ever need a place to stay,_ it reads. There’s an address scratched below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish you guys could see all of the cute moments I have written down for future chapters! In due time you will!! We're getting somewhere now. ALSO!! I can't tell you how happy your comments on the last chapter made me and I'd be lying if I said part of my motivation for writing this wasn't external validation from strangers so uh, thank you!!!


	5. Saw It was a Time for a Change

For weeks the scrap of paper burns a hole in the pocket of my denim jacket.  
I try to tell myself that it doesn’t mean anything that the slip is going soft from the way my fingers rub over it instinctively every time Neil’s voice raises, every time he takes a menacing step towards me, every time his fist raises or his boot comes down. 

I try to tell myself that nothing could be worse than going to Harrington’s house. And it’s true- I’ve dealt with my dad’s anger and aggression for years with no escape and managed just fine. I’m _okay._ Except for the way my head aches. 

It’s Friday night and I can almost feel the social standing that I had built for myself in the first two weeks of my arrival slipping through my fingers, which is how I land on the decision to go to a football game. The coach had sought me out when I transferred here to join the team, but the way that Bowman coached basketball, with practice and scrimmages starting long before the actual winter season, it wasn’t possible. 

“Max!” I shout from the kitchen. 

She comes scurrying around the corner from her room, in a flannel and jeans, a jacket layered overtop. “Oh my god, I’m coming, don’t get your panties in a twist.” She grins at her use of my own insult against me. 

I scowl, but there’s no venom behind it. “You’re lucky I’m letting you tag along at all, don’t push your luck. Get in the car.”

“Why, we’re already late anyway since _someone’s_ too cool to get places on time,” she grumbles. “Besides, I don’t think it counts as tagging along when you’re making me walk the last block.” 

I shrug at that. “Nothing personal.” 

Max is about to argue back at me, something she’s gotten increasingly more comfortable with lately, when she stops herself, raising her eyebrows. “What’re you wearing?”

I look down at the clothes on my body: a white tank top, with my leather jacket overtop, and jeans. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Billy,” she’s looking at me like I’m insane. “It’s December and 45 degrees out and you’re dressed like a male hooker. ”

A smile quirks on my mouth at her language. “California didn’t really give me the best wardrobe for a shithole town winter, Maxine.”

“I happen to know for a fact that my mom bought you three sweatshirts for the move.”

Max is right about that one- they were all different colors, a red, a grey, and a deep green, and they had appeared on my bed one day, sitting beneath some gas money. All I had done was stuff them under my bed, where they still sit now, sharing the space only with Harrington’s bat. 

“Go put on something warmer, I don’t have enough experience driving the Camaro to get us home if you get frostbite or something” 

“You don’t have any experience driving the Camaro!” 

“Mhm, right. Run along now!” Max singsongs and I walk towards my room to grab the green sweatshirt and switch out leather for denim. It’s a bit sickening, the way I’ve been listening to my step-sister the past few weeks. What’s more sickening is that it’s because she’s usually right. 

I reenter the kitchen, staring daggers at Max. “You’re walking the last _two_ blocks now.”

She holds up her skateboard and grins. “Worth it.”

As we walk out to the car, I hear her giggle to herself. 

It’s nice, I suppose, to hear her light and unafraid. Like a child should be.

\---

I’m in the bleachers with Tommy and his girl, Carol. Tommy may be stupid and irritating, but Carol is on a new level of insufferable, somehow simultaneously hanging all over Tommy while shamelessly flirting with me. After a few minutes I tune her out entirely, instead pretending to pay attention to the game.

My eyes catch on Max who, apparently, didn’t want to be seen with me any more than I wanted to be seen with her, judging by the way she hopped out of the car while it was almost still moving, set her skateboard onto the sidewalk, and sped away right when we hit the two block point from Hawkins High. 

She’s with a few of her friends- the Sinclair kid and the one with missing teeth and Byers’ brother. I’ve been keeping good on my promise to leave the group alone, though it’s a challenge sometimes. A part of me that still clings to the idea that I’m not an inherently evil asshole tells myself that the way I went after them was to protect Max, was because the idea of her with so many boys made me afraid for her. Another part of me, the part that knows I will never be anything that resembles good, reminds me that I just miss having such easy targets for my anger. 

There’s a shift in the crowd that was partially blocking my view of Max, and I see that Harrington is standing with them. _Speaking of easy targets._  
I watch as he sighs, exasperated, at the one with no teeth, who is tugging on his coat and clearly begging for something. Harrington takes some money out of his pocket and thrusts it at the kid, and the four of them skitter to the concession stand. Harrington just rolls his eyes and walks out of sight. 

“Be right back.” I murmur at Tommy. From the look on Carol’s face, I’m definitely leaving in the middle of a story she was trying to tell.

It’s subconscious, me getting up and following pretty boy. No, it’s not intentional, but I still do it. For days now I’ve been confused. Why would he give me a weapon and a chance at an escape? Why would he care in the slightest that something was happening to me, why wasn’t he just grateful that at least someone was putting me in my place now and then? 

My pace is quicker than my usual easy stroll as I try to catch up to where Harrington went. I finally find him again close to the soccer field behind the concession stand, over near the bathrooms. His back is turned away from me and he’s talking to his old girlfriend and Byers. I lean back against the brick of the stand and light a cigarette. I won’t go seek him out, but he’ll have to pass me when he makes his way towards the bleachers. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nancy look up from Harrington in alarm and nudge Byers at her side. Suddenly all three of them are glancing my way, but I continue to look ahead, pretending they’re beneath my notice. There’s a brief, hushed discussion that sounds almost angry, the only words I hear are “It’s fine, I’m good.” The words are Harringtons. 

I feel his presence next to me, leaning against the bricks on my left, a safe few feet away. “Didn’t think you were one for school functions.” 

“Am if there’s girls who need warming up.” I say back, not looking at him.

“Yet here you stand, no girls in sight.” He considers me a moment. “And no offense dude, but you are not wearing enough layers to keep _yourself_ warm, let alone some non-existent chick.” 

Unfortunately, he’s right on all accounts. No girls have approached me since I’ve arrived and I _am_ freezing, sweatshirt be damned. I play it off though, letting my tongue jut out between my lips. “Sometimes, princess, things are warmer without clothes. Didn’t your bitch over there ever show you that?” I nod my head at Nancy. When I do, she and Byer’s eyes flit away from me and Harrington. They’re clearly watching the interaction go down, though they’re out of earshot. 

He frowns. “You sure do hate girls for someone who screws them so much.”

“And you sure do defend them for someone who doesn’t.” 

“Yes I-” He stops, changing the subject. “How’s your head?” He peers at my temple, trying to analyze the bruise by the light of the moon, the distant stadium lights. 

I turn my head away. “Quit it. If I wanted to get a check up I’d go to the doctor,” I say, taking a drag from the cigarette. Without truly meaning to, I extend it to him. I don’t know why I do. Something has wormed its way into my head since that address dropped its way into my hand. Some molecular part of me sees Harrington as a way out, even though I’ll never take the opportunity. 

Harrington reaches for it, his eyes suspicious, and then his hand stops moving and he looks at me, perturbed. “Have you not… been to the doctor? For your head?” 

“No.” I shoot at him. I don’t bother adding any explanation, it’s not his business. 

Under his breath he mumbles, “Hop is gonna kill me.”

“The fuck has Hopper got to do with anything?” I ask, incredulously. 

He looks shocked that I heard him. “Nothing. I just- that wound was scary, dude. Getting it checked out is probably a good idea.” 

I smile, cruelly. “Fuck off or I’ll give you a matching one.” I turn to stomp away, but a hand clutches my shoulder and I wince at the unexpected touch, both from surprise and pain. There’s a healing bruise there. 

Harrington notices, but pretends not to. “You are genuinely impossible. What do I have to do for you to let me take you to a hospital? And don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt. The last time I had a bruise like that, thanks for that one by the way, it hurt for like ten days.” 

“And you, princess, are genuinely annoying.” Even though I use my condescending pet name for him, there’s a snarl in my voice. 

Harrington just holds my gaze, his look signifies that he’s still waiting for an answer. _What do I have to do for you to let me take you to a hospital?_

I think about the aching of my head, the ringing in my ears, the way the light hurts, and the dizzy spells that have been getting more and more frequent. _What do I have to do for you to let me take you to a hospital?_

“Drive Max around town like the rest of your brats for a week or two, I don’t have the gas money.” I say. No, Harrington taking me to the hospital would not be him doing me a favor, but me one for him. If I look at it that way, it isn’t as naseauting, isn’t as harsh a blow to my ego, is instead something I can lord over him. 

His lips crack a smile and the movement travels all the way up to his eyes, his face like a ray of sun in the dark field. “Anything else?”

“Never fucking smile at me like that again.” 

\---

The night passes. I get a coffee at the concession stand. Harrington gets one as well, but we don’t get them together, he’s just in line behind me (coincidentally, he says, when I send a glare over my shoulder at him for following me). I don’t pay attention to whether or not Hawkins wins, only sit in silence near Carol and Tommy, thinking about how, tomorrow morning, Harrington will pick me up in his stupid Beamer and take me to get my head checked. He takes his group of kids home a few minutes before the game ends. I take Max home shortly after, when I see her standing at the bottom of the bleachers, staring me down- she won’t come anywhere around Tommy and Carol, and frankly I can’t blame her. Neil and Susan are in bed when we get home. I follow suit, getting genuine sleep, wrapped in the green sweatshirt. It’s soft, but still has the smell of a store. I remind myself to give Susan some sort of thank you, even though I know I won’t. 

I dream of a little boy who is afraid. I dream of a woman with blonde curls and blue eyes who is never coming back. 

I wake to the sound of a honk outside my window and instinctively flinch. Neil won’t be pleased with the racket on a weekend. But when I look at my clock I see it’s already 10:30- my father has probably been gone for hours, avoiding a day at home with the family like usual. 

Jeans are just pulling up onto my hips when another honk sounds from outside. “Christ, alright!” I shout, even though Harrington won’t hear me from out there. Clearly we’re in a hurry, so I don’t bother to change out of my sweatshirt, only rearrange my chains’ clasp from the front to the back of my neck, as I stomp out the door. 

Harrington is smiling in the driver's seat of his car, the universe’s balance to the scowl I’m sporting. “Morning, sunshine! Dream of me?” He asks, seeming to be taking immense pleasure at the fact that he’s coerced me into doing something. 

_If you only know what I dreamed of,_ I think. What comes out though, is “I swear to god the deal is off if you don’t turn off Wham! and turn on some real music.” 

“You notice how this deal is beneficial almost entirely to you? And now I can’t even have Wham!?”

If the sun didn’t feel like an actual violent assault against the pain in my head, I would march right back inside, flipping him off behind my back. But whatever Harrington’s strange motivation is to help me- the fact that he’s quite plainly a better person than I am, or whatever he mentioned about Hopper last night, or, I swallow hard, pity- I really should go to the doctor. 

He seems to mistake my silence for indignance, which benefits me more than it hurts me, because he says, “Fine. Pick whatever you want, but _please_ something that isn’t going to burst my eardrums.” 

I smirk, knowing that isn’t going to happen. 

\---

“Why are you looking at me like a fucking math problem, Harrington?” His eyes keep flitting between me and the road. 

“Hey, I may be stupid but I’m good at math, okay? It’s just… well everything else.” He smiles, but then clears his throat and moves along when he notices I’m not looking to participate in happy banter about his geometry skills or lack thereof. “Right- anyway. I’m looking at you trying to figure out how far I can push this deal. So…?” He says, finally. 

As it turns out, I am concussed, though only mildly. The nurses were beside themselves when Harrington and I arrived, very much pleased to get to see us and not geriatric women with liver issues, which I assume is along the lines of what their regular shift consists of. They doted on me, concerned, but nevertheless, in awe of _my weight lifting accident._ To his credit, Harrington didn’t give away my cover story, though he didn’t say anything to back it up, either. He busied himself flirting with the prettiest of the nurses, who busied herself flirting with me. I took smug satisfaction in that. 

We’re listening to the rock station that I had put on for the ride up to the hospital. A song by Cinderella comes on and I crack up laughing. “This one’s for you, princess!” My fingers reach over to the volume knob to crank it up, but Harrington bats my hand away. 

“Quit it. You’re avoiding my question.”

He’s right, which is why I continue. “The band is called Cinderella! And you’re a princess. You get it?” 

“No, it went right over my head. You’re just too clever for silly, dumb me.” Harrington deadpans. “Now about this deal.”

“You really are no fun, pretty boy.” I say. The look on his face when the nurse told us the concussion was minor- when I turned to him and repeated her, saying “Minor! See that Harrington, no big deal?”- flashes behind my eyes. His expression screamed, _it is a huge deal._ It screamed, _a concussion is a concussion._ It screamed, _no father should do that to a son._ I had only given a dazzling smile and thank you to the nurse, covering for his horror. 

His foot pressing harder on the gas, he splutters, “You shouldn’t be driving or… or playing basketball… or-” the unspoken words hang in the air between us: _living there at all_. 

“The fuck you want me to do, pretty boy?”

We’re at a red light. His eyes, deep and brown and afraid, lock on mine. “You know what I want you to do.”

I think of the address nestled between denim on my bedroom floor. I growl, “No chance in hell, Harrington.” 

“Then what can I do to keep you from making your head worse?” he asks as he smoothly glides the Beamer to a stop in front of my house. 

“I already did what you asked, okay? The deal is done, my end of the bargain is complete. What you can do,” my eyes narrow, “is leave me alone.” 

He wants to help me. There’s someone in this world who is asking for me to _let_ them help me, instead of forcing me to my knees to beg for it, and yet I can’t bring myself to accept it. It’s been too many years fighting back alone. It’s instinctual, the way I feel violent and angry and _weak_ at Harrington’s attempts. 

“Yeah, Hargrove, seems fair.” There’s pain on his face and I want to slap it off. What the fuck does he know about pain?

His tires screech away. 

Neil comes home for the late lunch Susan prepares. He immediately grabs a beer from the fridge and he is so, so angry. 

Furiously sawing into his cut of pork, he rants about his day. The hardware store’s out of a part he needs and he received a call about increasing his work hours because someone has cancer and on and on and on. Another beer opens. 

“Did you know I’m concussed?” 

He looks up, red rage swarming his cheeks. “Is there a reason you’re interrupting me?”

“You’re yelling and my head hurts. Because I’m concussed.”

Neil is on his feet in an instant, his hands slamming on the table. Susan and Max hurry from the room and I feel a pang at having provoked my dad with Max so close to his fists. 

“Why is your headache my problem? Why, when I’m just trying to enjoy a meal, do your problems have to be mine?” His rage is hot and electric. On the surface it’s more frightening than the cool, stone anger he usually shows, but I know better. I know that this anger is safer, less calculated. 

“Hm. Maybe because you are the one who gave me the concussion.” 

I’m on the ground at record speed. Fists fly, hitting me from all angles, but I laugh, sharp and disjointed, because Neil is avoiding my head. He cares enough to avoid my head. 

In the evening, after Neil has taken his car out to go blow off steam, after I’ve washed my body of blood and am heading to the kitchen to get some dinner, since mealtime was cut short earlier, I stop short, hearing voices from the bathroom. I keep still and concealed, listening.

“I wish he wouldn’t provoke him like that. Not in front of you, at least.” That’s Susan’s voice.  
Max is quick to respond, almost cutting her off. “You know it isn’t Billy’s fault, mom. Neil’s the one who… concussed him.” My step-sister’s voice cracks. 

“It’s just… this is the night of the dance. You shouldn’t have to worry about something like that.” 

Fuck. Tonight’s that Snowball at the Middle School. 

“I don’t care about a stupid dance anyway, mom.” 

Susan’s voice responds with blatant doubt. “It’s quieter when he’s not here. Your step-father isn’t as… angry.” 

Max is silent, but I can feel in that silence that she agrees. 

A few moments go by and I force myself to move my muscles, to walk by the open bathroom door. 

“Ow, ow that hurts.” Max grumbles as Susan adjusts pins in her hair, getting her ready for the dance. 

“It’s gonna be worth it, I promise.” Susan assures, her voice returning to conversational, motherly. 

I lock eyes with Max in the mirror and she stares back at me, almost harshly, and I know I can’t stay anymore. 

I’ve been fooling myself to think that just because Neil doesn’t physically hurt her means that her life isn’t still tainted by him and what he does- does because of me. 

“See? Pretty.” I hear Susan say. But I’m already in my room. I grab my wallet and the keys to the Camaro. As a final thought I grab the bat from under my bed and my denim jacket. I slip out of the house without saying goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay first off I ~know~ Cinderella didn't release the first album til '86 but come on!! The joke was right there and I couldn't resist, forgive me. 
> 
> It makes me so so happy to read everyone's comments and see my stats go up little by little so thank you all so much!! Sharing my writing is making me feel a way I haven't felt since I was a kid. Anyway! I hope you enjoy this chapter, let me know what ya think! That scene before the Snowball always seemed so emotionally charged to me in the show so I had to build off it and now the Harringrove can really commence.


	6. All Your Well-Learned Politesse

It’s been over a month since I’ve really pushed my car to its limits, since I’ve pressed my foot progressively further and further down on the gas, like there’s a phantom hand on my thigh, bearing down until I’ve pushed the pedal almost flush with the floor. Been over a month since I screamed out of the open windows, music blaring loud enough to make my ears howl in pain, to the point where my shrieks eventually sound more like hysteric, musical laughter. 

And it’s been over a year since I’ve willingly pushed Neil to hurt me like I did today at lunch. Over a year since I’ve ached for his hands to hit me because I want to feel knocked around and in pain, and not just by some kid at school, but by him, my father. Over a year since I’ve craved a punishment to repent for the way my mind can be weak. 

My skin blisters, not from the rage, the adrenaline, but from the memory of a blazing California sun- from the joy felt during the day and the way that it was stripped away at night, back at home. The sun is always a double edged sword in my memory; the golden, honey sun of memories of my mother, and the white, blinding sun that was everything else. 

The speedometer ticks up to 95. I’m almost panting with laughter now, deranged and unhinged. My chest fucking hurts from where Neil’s knuckles made contact and this makes me laugh more. I think my eyes are on fire. 

Already I’ve been driving for more than an hour, managed to not only send myself deep into the etched line of road through vast Indiana cornfields, but loop back around so that suburbia is almost creeping back into view. My brain has to send the message three or four times before my foot eases on the gas and I bring myself slightly closer to the speed limit. I’m far from rational thinking, yes, but in only a little over a month it’s become instinctual to try to follow the rules, at least to keep Hopper off my case. 

The plan isn’t to go to Harringtons’, hell, there isn’t a plan at all, and yet I ease the car to an even slower speed as I turn into the richer part of town. I’ve settled into erratic giggles now instead of manic laughter, and they bubble out of me without permission- not in the way of a small child trying not to get in trouble for finding something funny, but in the way of a teenage boy who is so angry and afraid. 

I choke on another one of the little gurgles of noise as I park in front of Harrington’s house. I hadn’t needed to look at the note to remind myself of the address, I had it memorized, a part of me having known it was going to come to this, maybe. 

I don’t give myself time to be conscious of what I’m doing. Like so many things in my life- my charming attitude to some and my cruelty to others, my music that drowns out my thoughts, the way I submit to Neil- it’s just a means of survival, an instinct for self preservation. I close the door of the Camaro. _It’s just how I’ll keep my head above water._ The soles of my shoes hit the driveway. _It’s how I’ll keep air in my lungs until high school is over._ I stand in front of the door. _It’s the one way Max can feel peace in her own home._ My knuckles rap on wood, knocking. _It’s how she can be a child._

A few moments pass. There’s no answer. I knock again, louder. Still there’s nothing. The door doesn’t creak open, Harrington’s face doesn’t peer out at me, smirking or scowling or sporting that goofy grin, or whatever I was expecting. 

_Of course._ For all of his talk of looking out for me, for all of his kindness, I’m an idiot to be here at all, to take him up on an offer I can’t repay, don’t want to have to repay. I begin walking back to my car, my footfalls quicker than they were on the way up. This is a relief. It’s a relief he isn’t here. 

Headlights. The sound of tires on pavement. A Beamer pulls onto the road, an indiscernible song making its muffled way through the closed window. 

_Fuck._ The music turns off, the lights fade to dark and Harrington gets out of his car, looking irritable, lost deep within his own head. His gaze shifts upward as he starts walking towards his house and then he registers I’m there. Something between worry and a satisfaction not at all smug plays on his face. “Hargrove?”

“I was. Just leaving.” I mutter. 

Harrington cocks his head to the side, like he usually does when we torment each other, but his eyes are clearly not committed, they’re still distant, a part of whatever was going on in his head before he noticed me. “You were just leaving my empty house?”

“Yes.” I say, and turn to unlock my car. 

He’s at my side suddenly. “Woah woah woah, hey. Come in, yeah?” 

My whole body is rigid. I don’t want to go into his house, into this cavernous mansion full of nice things and a nice boy. I have to go into this house, for Max. I swallow, the motion almost painful and sticking in my throat. 

“I could use a beer.” Harrington says, his vision starting to come into focus more, his lips plucking upwards into a small smile. 

I place my keys into my pocket, almost with finality. “Yeah. Me too.” 

Following him into the house, I make an effort to slip my usual mask back on, instead of the hysterics from the car or the nervous way I handled myself outside. “You’re back home early for a Saturday night. Cum too quick with whatever chick you were with?” 

Harrington opens the fridge and tosses a can of beer at me, a little too harshly, but I catch it anyway. “I was just driving Dustin to the dance at the middle school. He was nervous trying to impress your- uh nevermind.” His face turns a bit pink. 

I think he was going to say my step-sister. Isn’t she with that Sinclair kid? Christ, she’s got these boys whipped. “Do you do anything besides babysit children?” 

He smiles, wide and silly. “I also give free beer to assholes.” 

“Well cheers to that,” I say, not cruelly, but also not returning his smile. I pop the tab on the beer, it’s a nicer brand than I usually can afford. I look around his kitchen. Fuck, _everything_ here is nicer than I can usually afford, than I’ll ever be able to afford. “Lovely palace, your highness.”

He sighs, looks at me. “Yeah. I’m, uh, lucky.” 

“They ever actually like _you_ or just the place?”  
Harrington lets out a short, almost harsh laugh. “ _You’re_ only here for the place, not because you like me. I guess that’s probably true of everyone else.” 

I’m here because Steve Harrington is a freakishly kind person. I’m here because he is smarter than I give him credit for, if he figured out I needed a place to stay as badly as I did. “True,” I say, trying to put the fire into my eyes. 

His mouth makes a sad smile and he turns away, walking into a living room. “Grab two more beers, I’ll put on a movie.” 

“Wasn’t really thinking we were having a slumber party, pretty boy. Thought I was here to crash in one of the seventy bedrooms and not bother you.” 

He turns back around, tired. “I haven’t had the best night, Hargrove. Come try to be pleasant company, your King commands it.” 

I actually cackle at that. “Alright, your majesty. You want a slumber party, I’ll grab the nail polish and Cosmos.”

He shoots me a look but it softens when he sees in my eyes that I’m kidding, that I’m not saying it to be mean. He restarts his walk into the living room and I follow behind him, my open beer in one hand and the two unopened ones between my fingers of the other. 

Harrington sits down on the couch. I look around the room for a chair to sit in and my eyes land on a recliner. I’m about to settle into it. “You won’t be able to see the television from there and there won’t be a place for you to put your drink. Just-” he looks almost, almost scared. “Sit here, okay?”

I walk over to the couch and sit as far to the right of it as I can, since Harrington has taken up residence in the middle, and set the two spare beers on the coffee table. I take a long sip of my current one. While my head is tilted back, I watch as he scoots two coasters under the drinks I’ve set down, trying to be discrete. I swallow the sarcastic comment that’s trying to creep out of my throat and instead say, “So. Why did you have a supremely bad night?” 

He looks a little shocked that I’ve asked. “I didn’t say it was bad, just that it wasn’t the best.” 

I look at him to continue. He does. “Ugh, fine. I drove Dustin to that stupid Snow Ball and Nancy was chaperoning just looking… beautiful, but she was there with Jonathan and-” he looks at me, like he’s waiting for me to rip on him for calling his ex girlfriend beautiful or that she left him for Byers, but I don’t. 

“... and yeah. It just um. Sucks.” he finishes.  
“Yeah, man. That blows.” 

Harrington smiles. “Octopussy okay?”

“Didn’t take you for a Bond guy.”

“I’m only human, Hargrove.” 

\---

The movie is fine. I’ve seen it already, back in a theatre in California last June, so I have trouble letting it really take my mind off of anything. Instead the feeling of punches and the look Max gave me in the mirror and the sound of Susan’s voice saying _It’s quieter when he’s not here_ all assault me. 

Harrington, however, doesn’t seem to have the same problem. Whatever heartbreak he had been feeling about Wheeler was wiped away the second the opening credits began and Rita Coolidge’s voice crooned over imagery of half-nude women. No, Harrington is not a Bond guy, he’s just a _guy_.

I distract myself by trying to calculate how much all of the expensive trinkets on the Harrington mantle cost until the movie ends, 007 having saved the day once again. 

A remote clicks the television off. “Do you need a toothbrush?” 

I blink. “Huh?”

“A toothbrush, and like pajamas? Do you need them?”

“Oh. Uh, no. I’ve got stuff in my trunk.” I stand up to go out to the Camaro. 

Harrington stands too. “Why your trunk?”

I don’t understand the question. “... For, I don’t know, emergencies?” I walk outside and rattle around in the back of the car until I grab a duffle that has a toothbrush and paste and a few shirts. I take a look at Harrington’s terrifying bat and grab that too. Best to return it now. 

I go back inside and Harrington is standing there, exactly where I left him. I hand him the bat. “Here ya go, pretty boy. Thanks for the, uh, loan.” 

“Do you sleep in your car?” His face looks sad but like it’s trying desperately not to let on that it is. 

“Never for more than a few nights at a time. Don’t you worry about little old me.” It was the wrong thing to say, clearly. 

“A few _nights_?” he’s dumbstruck. “Bil- Hargrove… it’s fucking _cold_ out.”

“Yeah, no shit.” I push past him, heading towards a staircase I saw earlier. “Just show me where the peasants sleep.” 

Within a few minutes, my belongings are settled on a bed in the guest room that’s next to Harrington’s. I’m told that the bathroom is down the hall and that there’s an alarm clock on the nightstand and how to set it. I’m told that I can eat anything I want for breakfast if I wake up first and that there’s weights in the basement if I need them. I feel almost numb with how much he’s talking, how much he’s _offering_ , like I live here now. Like this whole situation is normal and not the strangest thing I could imagine happening in this town. 

“Okay, well. I’ll be in my room. Do you, uh, need anything else?” 

I think about how quiet it is in this part of town, how deafening that silence will be tonight. “Do you have a walkman, maybe?” Guilt rushes through me at asking for anything else from the person who is already being more generous than I’ll ever deserve, but I keep a smirk on my face, hoping entitlement looks good on me. 

“Oh, yeah! Borrow mine, I don’t need it.” Harrington darts out of the room and is back in a moment or two, walkman in hand. “Here! You need a tape?”

I laugh, mean, but conspiratorial. “No, pretty boy. I promise I don’t need Wham!’s greatest hits.” 

That goofy grin splays across his face. “One day you’ll change your mind about my music.” He considers me. “Probably the same day you start smiling like an actually happy person and not like a predator.” With that he walks out of the room, closing the door behind him. 

\---

When the screaming starts, I think it’s just something from the background of the Van Halen song that’s giving my eardrums a beating, but it sounds too distant. I try to yank myself out of the dreamless sleep that had come over me the moment I had my music on and had slipped under the expensive comforter in Harrington’s guest room. I had actually been feeling at peace until now. 

“Christ, there’s nowhere, is there?” I mutter to myself as I extricate my limbs from the tangle of sheets and blankets, irritated. 

Now that my headphones are taken off, it’s clear that, yes, there is definitely screaming, or maybe it’s more of a sob now. I walk into the room next to mine, where the sounds are escaping from. It’s dark and I can’t really see.

Fumbling for a lightswitch I say, “Fuck, pretty boy, are you getting murdered? Everyone’s gonna think it was me, and I don’t feel like dealing with Hopp-” My fingers have found the switch and the room floods with light. I stop my sentence. 

Harrington is on his bed, his whole body contorted in and around itself. His jaw bites into his knee, muffling his screams. Eyes wild and erratic, far from his bedroom, and his hand with a death grip on the bat I’d returned to him. “Harrington?” I venture.

He doesn’t so much as twitch at my voice, just continues shaking, his body wound too tightly. “Harrington.” I say more sharply, hoping to jolt him out of his stupor. Still, nothing. It’s like when I first got here and knocked on the door and got no answer- no one’s home. 

I walk to him, slowly, like he’s a wounded animal. My first instinct is to reach out and touch him soothingly, like my mother would do for me after a nightmare or a beating from my father. My second instinct, the one I’ve drilled into myself for years, is to tell him to “shut the fuck up” and slam the door to leave him with his pain. My third instinct, the one I act on, is to steadily place my hand over his, the one that’s on the bat, so that he doesn’t try to kill me when I approach him. Regardless of whatever stilted camaraderie we had played at this evening, I’m assuming if the first thing he saw when he snapped out of it was the guy who had beat his face in a few weeks ago, he’d start swinging. 

My palm places itself firmly over the back of his hand. “Harrington,” I say, as pacifying as I can, but it still somehow sounds mean. I always sound mean.

Finally, he blinks and looks up at me. I’m shocked that he looks less afraid instead of more. “Billy?” 

“Yeah. Uh, maybe put the bat down?” 

He looks down at his hand, our hands, and looks confused, perhaps not realizing he had picked up the weapon at all. _No,_ I realize, _it’s because I’m holding his fucking hand._ I snatch it away, startling him. 

Harrington lets his fingers unclench and the bat hits the floor. He’s still shaking so hard. I want so badly to leave and never see him look this vulnerable again. I want so badly to stay and make sure that he at least doesn’t look that way much longer. “Everything… okay?” I ask.

The situation has hit him, it seems, because he looks a bit embarrassed. “Yeah. Fine. Just a nightm- dream. Just a dream.”  
“You always end up wielding a weapon when you’re dreaming? Cause that makes me a little concerned for my safety, living here and all.” 

He doesn’t react to the joke, just looks through me. “No. Just sometimes. Only with bad dreams, I guess.” 

“The fuck does someone like you have nightmares about? What could possibly make you wake up screaming, the thought of your little girlfriend fucking someone else?” Why? Why am I being cruel? I’ve trained myself all too well to snap to that second instinct, to push. To push people either away or to their limit so that they snap. 

Harrington isn’t leaving in fury though, nor does he look like he’s about to try to beat me to death again. He only looks tired. “Yep, you’ve got me nailed down. Dreamt I choked on my silver spoon and now I may never know peace again.” It’s a joke, I think, but he looks so hollow that I can’t banter off of it. That hollowness makes me sting, for him. 

“Yeah well I’ve gotten myself beaten half to death by my father for years and I never wake up screaming like that.” I offer. It’s the first time I’ve said it aloud, admitted verbally what Neil does to me. 

“Good for fucking you, I guess, Hargrove. I’m fine, you can go.” 

I hadn’t meant it as a dig, but my voice always seems to come out that way. I had meant that what was plaguing him must somehow be worse, more terrible, than my own nightmares, even though that sounds impossible, considering he’s Steve Harrington and I’m Billy Hargrove. “Fuck, no, I just- do you wanna um…” _God, I’m fucking terrible at this._ “Talk about it?” 

“No can do.” His small smile isn’t reaching his eyes, which are still empty, still hollow, still distant. 

Why does it pain me to look at him like that? “You want some music? I got Van Halen.” Why am I still in here?

Harrington looks at me for a long moment, squinting, trying to figure me out. It’s the most present he’s looked since waking up and I can actually feel myself exhale. “No, I don’t need music. You could… sit with me, though.” 

I hadn’t been planning on staying. I was going to restart my tape in the player, jam the headphones over his ears, and hope to God it would lull him to sleep as good as any mom’s lullabies like it did for me. I hadn’t been planning on _staying._

Yet here are my feet, walking towards him. 

I stop next to his bed, about to lower myself to the floor to lean against the nightstand. 

“Is it really that revolting to sit on the bed? Would that really kill you?”

“Guess not,” I grumble. I was sitting on the floor so _he_ wouldn’t be uncomfortable. God. I stop my descent to the floor and instead walk to the other side of the bed, sitting down awkwardly on the edge, as far from Harrington as the Queen size will allow. 

Except now he’s just _looking at me_ and I don’t have a fucking clue what he wants. “You should, uh, go back to sleep. I can stay here, if you want,” I say. When I have bad dreams, I used to like when my mom would stay with me. There isn’t anyone to comfort me now, besides a beer can, maybe. 

“If I close my eyes I’ll start thinking.” He mumbles, those brown eyes still staring into me. 

“Um. Alright?” I say. I’m so uncomfortable. With the way he looks like he’s grateful that I’m here. And with the way my back is twisted at a weird angle. Everything about this is uncomfortable. 

“You should tell me about California.” He’s matter-of-fact- about his. Part of me wants to hit the back of his skull, snap him back into our usual snideness towards each other. But he looks calmer than he did and there’s some disgusting part of me that likes that I’ve calmed him down, that likes that he’s comforted by me instead of afraid. 

California. What can I say about California? I’m not gonna talk about my fucking childhood, the good or the bad. Not the first punch Neil through, not the way my mom would praise me when I would successfully catch a wave. Not the tentative friendship Max and I built in the beginning that dissolved into cruelty over the past year, only just now starting to take shape again. No, there’s nothing. I try to unlock the part of my brain that’s been closed for so long I forgot it was there. The part that contains a handful of joy, followed by a mountain of pain. 

“Please.” Harrington’s voice is almost a whimper and I can’t, I can’t say no. 

Elizabeth. Betty. Beth. That I can do, she I can do. “This might come as a shock to you, Harrington, but I had a best friend before I moved to this shithole town of yours.”

He scoots a little closer to me, expectant. Christ. “Was he as big of a dick as you?” 

I smile. “Nah, I honest to God think she was a bigger one.” 

His eyebrows raise. “A girlfriend isn’t a best friend.” 

“Did I say girlfriend? No. It wasn’t like that, man.”

He looks unconvinced but keeps quiet. 

I continue. “Her name was Elizabeth. Betty. Except I called her Beth because of that stupid Kiss song that she fucking _hated_. We met at school. I had a bruise on my cheek and she looked at me and laughed in my face. Kinda hurt my feelings for a second, ya know? But then she turned her chin and I saw she had a matching one and she just grinned at me and said “Our old mans long lost brothers or something?” They aren’t, just both fought in ‘Nam and have no patience because of it. But I don’t think I went a day without seeing her after that.” 

_I’m fourteen. Beth is playing me my first Iron Maiden song and we’re speeding down the highway even though neither of us have a license. She stole the car from the auto shop her dad runs. It’s one in the morning. My stomach hurts like hell from the beating that caused me to run to her house for comfort, but now it hurts from laughing. What had she said that was so funny? Why was she always the funniest?_

“We both had piece of shit dads who took too much joy in hurting us. I didn’t think dads did that to daughters, but Beth was an only child and I guess she’s all he had to hit. Her mom wasn’t around. Died giving birth to her, I think.” 

_She’s laughing at a joke I told, or maybe just at something stupid I did. She’s crying over something and thinking I won’t notice. She’s walking with her arm slung around my shoulder and we fucking own whereever we go and she’s the brother I never had._

“We ruled our school, Harrington, God! They loved us because we were hot and because we only paid attention to each other.” I catch myself grinning. “I know it may seem like I was born being the coolest motherfucker alive, but it was all her. Shit, my hair is even long so it would be the same length as hers. She showed me how hot double denim could look and how to shotgun a beer. She showed me every fuckin band I listen to.” 

Harrington is looking at me and I can’t read him. I’ve never seen this expression on his face before but I can’t make myself care. I’m too caught up in _BethBethBeth._

_We’re laying on a blanket on the beach, the stars pin pricking the dark sky. We’ve been here talking for hours. She’s pressed up against me, my chest as a pillow and my arm as a blanket, and she’s dozing. She murmurs my name in her sleep and I know she feels safe. I know I feel safe._

“We’d work out together. She was trying to be more muscly than me, I think. Would always say, “Don’t be a pussy, Billy Goat.” and make sure I added an extra 10 pounds to whatever I was lifting. She was a bitch, I swear to God.” 

Harrington is still beside me. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him this much in all of our conversations combined. Hell, maybe I haven’t talked this much to anyone since Beth. “My Camaro was her idea too. It came into her dad’s auto shop and he gave me a fair price as long as I’d help him out at the end of the day. I think she wanted it for herself, but he’d never let her buy something that would make her happy, ya know? So I bought it and we’d drive it together. Always together.” 

“When we’d walk into parties, Harrington, God. We’d both be in button downs, mine all unbuttoned, hers up higher because of, well, you know, but it would go off her shoulder. She’d be glued to me and the girls would just _flock_ to both of us. They wanted us so bad.” 

Harrington’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “Bet the guys were all over her.” He sounds almost angry.

“What? No, dude. The guys were fucking afraid of her. Hell, I would’ve been if she hadn’t made the decision that I was gonna be her friend before we even spoke. The girls though…” 

I shouldn’t of started talking about Beth, what the fuck was I thinking. This is about to get sticky. 

_A girl I like walking towards me, except no, it’s not towards me, it’s towards her. Her fingers brush Beth’s shoulder as they talk. Both of their eyes are on fire, looking at each other. Excusing themselves. So much heat radiating off of them. I’m left alone._

“Beth wasn’t really one to… care about a guy’s attention. She was into cars and muscles and metal and… no guys weren’t really her thing.” 

“And that… upset you?” Harrington asks. He seems so genuinely confused, so hesitant to ask anything. I don’t think I can turn back now. 

_Flopping on her bed at the end of the night, her dad out. Both of us drunk and high and tired, back from the party, ready to sleep. Beth turning to me in the dark. “How much pussy you get tonight?” Her voice is gravel._

_“I fucked one girl.”_

_Beth’s grin._

_“What’s so funny.”_

_“I fucked two.” She’s grinning like the cheshire cat._

“No, Harrington, I told you, it wasn’t like that. I don’t care that she didn’t like me like that, I didn’t like _her_ like that. We both… girls would just be all over both of us.” 

I can feel in the air that he gets it. I’m praying he doesn’t say something stupid like “That’s hot” because then I might actually have to kill him and I don’t want to because he’s the only person I’ve talked to in so, so long. 

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.” 

“Was that okay out there? In California?” 

“No.” 

_Beth is at my window and she’s sobbing. She’s saying, “He caught me, Billy Goat, he caught me with Jen. We were… it was bad, Billy it was really bad.” She’s holding a duffle bag and she’s more bruised than I’ve ever seen her._

_“Where are you going?”_

_“He’s taking me away from here. I snuck out to come tell you but we’re leaving, like, now. Billy he’s taking me away from you.”_

_Her voice is cracking and it’s mom leaving all over again. It’s a son of a bitch old man forcing someone from my life to leave me too soon. Different man, different person I love, same outcome. Same feeling of emptiness in my chest._

_“Beth.”_

_“Billy.”_

_So that’s why you’ve been staring at yourself in the mirror like some faggot._

“Billy are you okay?” Harrington asks, his fingertips touching my arm. 

I yank my arm away and feel that I’m crying, I’m actually fucking crying in front of Harrington. “Fine. Least I’m not sobbing for mommy because of a nightmare.” 

My walls are shutting down, closing. I get up to leave but Harrington pulls my arm to him. “You said you’d stay here if I wanted.” 

Why would he want me here? After that unnecessary dig and after beating the shit out of him and after never not being an asshole for more than a minute at a time, why would he want me here? 

“And I want you here.” Sleep is starting to take over him and he’s clutching my arm still, holding me there, to him. “You can sleep, you’re safe here.” 

_Beth curled around me on the beach, murmuring my name. We’re safe._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I'm sorry for the wait! I've been feeling self-conscious about my writing and about the story in general but finishing this chapter helped me push through it! I still have so many ideas for the narrative and just for little scenes to work in, so more stuff will be out soon! I hope you enjoyed part of Billy's California origin story lol, it means a lot to me. Anyway, hope everyone is doing well! Let me know what you think of this chapter/the story so far and stay tuned for more!


	7. As Heads is Tails

I wake up to the sun pushing its way through the cracks in Harrington’s blinds. Well, “wake up” is a strong way to put it. I never moved from my half sitting up position, so the little sleep I got has left me cramped and stiff. I turn my head towards Harrington. He’s wormed his way under the blanket during the night, so he must’ve let go of my arm at some point, yet his fingers are still clutching me, his body facing me. From above, I’m sure the image of us would be strange- a boy bundled in sheets and snoring and turned so vulnerably towards another, who is still in his jeans and sits on the bed over the blankets, looking like he’s ready to dash at any moment. 

I pull my arm away. Whatever happened last night, whatever comfort I provided him after his bad dream and whatever interest he showed in my tumbled, painful words about California can never happen again. I’ll go live in my car in the dead of a Midwestern winter if I have to. 

I have the same feeling that hits me after a night of drinking until I black out, the feeling that whatever my brain let me do in the altered, walls down state I was in was _too much._ It wasn’t the two beers that intoxicated me though. It was Harrington. 

Standing up, I remember his offer from before he fell asleep the first time- that I can use the coffee maker if I get up first. And hell, I’m not one to turn up my nose at any rich people food. I got a look at the counter last night and it was no tin of Folgers. 

In the kitchen, I start the brew after a bit of trial and error. The Harrington’s machine is at least a decade newer than the one Susan brought when she and Neil moved in together. I make sure to put enough so that pretty boy can have some when he wakes up. I don’t know why. I’m having trouble balancing the way I’m supposed to treat him. On one side of the scale, I want to snap and be mean, hurl insults that I know will sting, so that he forgets every last detail of my life that I told him last night. On the other, it feels strange to treat someone like shit when you’re living in their house. It feels strange to be mean to someone who wakes up screaming and crying. Cruelty to Harrington is both wrong and the only thing I know. 

I light a cigarette, having never taken the pack and lighter out of my pants pocket, and pour myself a mug of the now finished coffee. The mug I managed to find after opening a few wrong cabinets reads “REAGAN|BUSH ‘84”. Christ. 

“Maybe don’t smoke in my house?” 

I startle at his voice. I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs or into the kitchen. I take another puff and blow it out towards him. “Nice mug.” 

Harrington sighs. “It’s my dads.” He walks over and takes the cigarette from between my fingers, takes his own puff on it, then stubs it out in the sink. He’s smirking at me. “No smoking, you can go outside for that.” 

That’s fair. 

He pours himself a mug as well, sans the political logo, and walks over to a record player, places the needle on a record that hadn’t been put away the last time it spun. 

“Harrington,” I almost whine. “Against my better judgement I’m actually trying not to be an asshole but you’re really testing me. Patsy Cline?”

When he turns around from the player, he’s already sporting that grin of his. I realize that he knew exactly what my reaction would be when he turned it on. “Aw come on, Hargrove? You never listen to anything that isn’t eardrum crushing? You never go out walking after midnight? Out in the moonlight? Just like we used to do?” 

He’s swaying a bit to the music and trying not to break into laughter. 

“My music isn’t _eardrum crushing_ , it’s just cool. It’s real music.” My brain tells me to scowl. My mouth twitches, trying to follow orders. A smile forms instead. 

Harrington wrinkles his nose. “Ugh. You sound like Jonathan.”

He grins at the horrified look on my face. “Besides, I didn’t have a Beth to teach me about this _real_ music everyone is always talking about.” 

I do scowl now, no instructions from my brain required. “No.”

He looks at me. “No?”

“Last night didn’t happen. So help me God, I’ll leave, pretty boy. I never said anything about Beth. You don’t know who Beth is. You’ve never heard of her. I didn’t cr-.” I stop myself, not even wanting to face the embarrassment of crying in front of him. “It. Didn’t. Happen.”

Harrington looks a little sad, but also like he understands. Good. That part of my head is back under lock and key. If I let my everyday thoughts flit back to her, pay any attention to what I’ve lost, the stitches that I sewed into the wound will tug at themselves, will come out, and the cut will reopen, the bleeding starting again. I was an idiot to think she’d be a safe topic, but sitting there with him made me want to remember, just for a minute, what it felt like to care. 

I try to navigate back to something safe. “So, princess. Mommy and daddy leave you money for pizza for breakfast? 

The smile comes back onto his face after its short hiatus and he reaches into a cookie jar, unearthing a handful of money. “Obviously.” 

\---

All week, Harrington insists on driving both of us to school, still worried about me driving with a concussion. I argue that I’m feeling better, and it’s true, but he doesn’t let up. I manage to convince him to drive the Camaro instead of the Beamer, though, and when we’re a block away from school, I take over the driver's seat and he walks the rest of the way.

All week, we spend a ridiculous amount of money ordering takeout for dinner. We have to go to the liquor store twice because we’re going through beers so fast. We watch more movies than I have probably seen in my life, two or three a night. We could do something else, talk maybe, or even go to our separate rooms, do separate things. But when we’re both home, we’re together, a full couch cushion length between us, not talking, just watching movie after movie in amiable silence. After his nightmare and after my confession, I don’t think either of us are keen on talking much- worried about what might spill out once we start. For once, we don’t push each other to irritation, we just exist in the same space. 

Most of the time. 

When we get home from school on Thursday, the last day before the Holiday break, the phone on the kitchen wall rings and Harrington takes his time walking over to answer it. Once he’s ventured a “Harrington Residence,” and gets a response, though, his face shows relief. “Oh, hey.” 

I listen to his end of the conversation. “No.” “Um, shit did I say that?” “No, no I remember now.” “Fine.” “No, I’ll be there.” “Gotta stop in with Hop- with someone first, but I’ll be there.” “Can I bring my friend?” “Yes, I have friends who aren’t thirteen, asshole.” “No, I can say bad words, you can’t. Because, well, thirteen.” “Yep. Bye.”  
“Assuming that wasn’t your dad?” I ask. His dad called earlier this week and Harrington looked sick to his stomach for almost a full hour after. 

He smiles. “Nah, just Dustin.” 

I wrinkle my nose. “Little curly one, no teeth?” 

“Hey don’t- he has Clei- um. Cleido- uh.”

“Don’t hurt yourself, pretty boy.”

He glares at me. “ _A genetic thing_ , okay?” 

“Okay what did the kid with the _genetic thing_ want?” I mimic his tone. It’s fun to torment him, to see the crease between his brows, the one that isn’t quite as deep as when I’m hitting him.

“Reminding me about a promise I made a damn week ago to take him and The Party to the arcade.”

“The fucking what?” It’s getting more and more obvious that even without the hair and the muscles, I could’ve taken Harrington’s thrown when I moved here. He’s a fucking _nerd_ , I swear. 

“The Par- ugh, nevermind. Him and the other kids, your sister included.”

My eyes narrow. 

“Step-sister,” he corrects. “God, you’re picky. Anyway, you’re invited.”

“Huh?” I doubt that. The last time most of them saw me, I was shattering a plate over their babysitters head. 

“You heard me on the phone, I asked if I could bring a friend. Dustin said yes.” 

“But you didn’t specify that it was me- wait. Harrington, I am _not_ your friend.” 

We spend most of our time together, but we don’t talk much. We drive to school together, but still treat each other with contempt in front of an audience. His nightmares wake me up some nights, but I don’t go to check on him. He took me to my house in the middle of the school day so I could throw a bag of clothing together, has given me a place to live and pays for me to eat every night and makes sure I don’t do anything to make my concussion worse during the day, but I don’t thank him. No, I’ve kept him at arm's length. Even though that’s the closest anyone has been in awhile, it’s still far away enough. We aren’t friends. 

“You are the most exhausting person I’ve ever met. You really won’t let me have one friend who isn’t either my ex girlfriend or a middle schooler?” 

He’s asking me to _let_ us be friends. He asked me to _let_ him take me to the hospital, give me a place to live. “You must be really fucking lonely if you’re begging someone who almost killed you to be your friend.” 

Harrington rolls his eyes. “You think that’s lost on me?” He takes on a more serious expression. “Besides, don't come as my friend. Come to see Max. She’s… well she’s worried okay? Lucas told me… well he told me you didn’t tell her you were leaving? She doesn’t know where you are and-”

“Stay out of my business, Harrington.” I almost growl. Real anger is running through me- started when he called me his friend, came to a boil when he brought up Max. 

“Can you just let me say something _one time_?” he shoots back, his own anger almost matching mine. “You’re sis- Max is confused, okay? She thought things were better between you and you just left, that’s- that’s _shitty_. Why can’t you just fucking accept that there’s people who care about you, that you can’t just fucking disappear and-”

“NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT ME. ARE YOU STUPID? NO ONE FUCKING DOES.” My face is bright red from shouting. 

_Quieter when he’s not here._

__

__

_Like some faggot._

_Billy, he's taking me away from you._

My brain won’t shut up. My nails rake into my scalp. 

“God you are the biggest asshole.” Harrington says, with a venom I’ve never heard in his voice before. He grabs his jacket and his car keys. “And I’m not stupid.” He says, so quietly that I barely hear him as he walks out the door. 

I don’t know why the slam makes me ache. 

\---

It’s eleven when Harrington gets back home. I’m out by the pool. I’m drunk. There’s a shattered bottle of his father’s expensive whiskey next to the lounger I’m sprawled across. 

The sound of sneakers on concrete gets closer. His frame blocks the light that was coming from the house. “It’s a wonder you haven’t gotten hypothermia ten times over since you’ve moved here.” He huffs. “Outside in a tank top in December.” 

“That’s what the whiskey’s for.” I mumble. “Keeps the veins warm.” I had to do something to shut my brain up after he left. I couldn’t sit around with the discomfort that maybe I had hurt Max. That somehow I had hurt Harrington. That Harrington wanted to insist that people cared about me, like that wasn’t a dream that was hit out of me years ago. 

He takes off his sweatshirt and tosses it at me. It’s well worn, not the too-new fabric of the ones Susan bought for me. I’m piss drunk, so I put it on, not really thinking. It smells like cigarettes and sweat. Cologne and popcorn. 

“You aren’t an asshole.” He says, looking at me with so much intensity, so much that I close my eyes so that I don’t have to see his.

“Am too.” 

“Okay then, asshole. Let’s go to bed.”

I feel an arm around my middle. I feel it drag me off the lounger, through the door, up some stairs, onto a bed. I feel the softness of sheets. I feel the weight of another body flop onto the bed next to mine. 

A mumble from Harrington. “People do care.” 

I pretend to be asleep. 

Harrington is absent from my side when I wake in the morning. If it weren’t for his plaid walls assaulting my vision and his sweatshirt still clinging to my arms and torso, I’d think that last night was all a stupid dream. 

I sit up, surveying the room, not yet having had the chance to look around without Harrington’s eyes on me. There’s beer cans everywhere. I’m not shocked- he drinks like he’s trying to drown something. Or himself. I should know. 

Mostly it’s just a mess. Clothes litter the floor. His desk is a mountain of papers and lamps. The nail studded bat leans against the nightstand on the side of the bed where he sleeps, where I had intended to sit the night of his dream. There isn’t much on his walls that show much of his old life as King, but there’s tack marks from where pictures of Wheeler and Tommy and Carol probably used to be. It looks lonely. 

Harrington nudges into the room and I quickly try to look like I haven’t been taking the room in. He hands me some water and painkiller. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that bottle was three quarters full before last night so. You might need these.” 

I take them. “You didn’t have to watch me last night, pretty boy. I’m a big boy, I can handle my liquor. Not gonna puke and die in my sleep.” That’s what I say instead of _I’m sorry I yelled at you and that I broke a bottle and that I called you stupid._

He huffs, bemused. “Someone’s awful self-centered.” 

“That’s my whole image, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Yeah. I’ve noticed. I just-” he quiets, the humor in his voice dropping. “Don’t like to sleep alone, okay?”

I think of the haunted look in his eyes when he woke up screaming. I think of his voice saying _You could… sit with me though_. I think of his fingers wrapped around my arm. 

He continues. “I used to pick Nance up after her parents had gone to bed, sneak her here so she could sleep with me. Or sometimes I’d sleep at her house. But now…” He trails off. 

“So what, I’m your replacement for Wheeler?” I grumble, still trying to clear the sleep from my voice. 

He beams. “You’d love that, wouldn’t ya?” 

I give him a shove.

But I let Harrington crawl into my bed that night, when he thinks I’ve fallen asleep. 

And I let him crawl into my bed the nights that follow. I don’t mind it. I just keep my headphones on. If it weren’t for the smell of him, I’d forget he was there at all. 

The music in my ear ceases and I jolt awake, expecting to see Neil ripping my headphones off, accusing me of drinking a beer I never touched, a weight cracking against my skull. It’s just Harrington, his eyes not on me, but fiddling with my walkman. Well, his walkman. It's the fourth night in a row of him coming in here. I must've fallen asleep before his arrival, having grown used to his presence in a way that my mind no longer stays awake awaiting him. 

“The fuck’re you doing?” I pant. 

He looks up at me, a little guilty, a little pleased with himself. “Switching your music. I can hear it screaming the second I walk in here. No wonder you have nightmares.”

“I do not having fucking nightmares.” I say, my facedown into my pillow. At least not ones that he should be aware of. 

“Do too. You talk in your sleep, asshole.” 

This is news. “Slayer has nothing to do with my dreams, princess. Lemme sleep.” 

“Nah,” he says, smirking in the dark of the room. 

I whip up. “You are grossly overestimating my need for housing, shitbird.” 

A hand prods my shoulder back down to the bed. “Oh shut up, will you? Come on, it’s not pussy music. It’s good. It’s all your bands just,” he furrows his brow. “ _Quieter_.”

His hands finish their fiddling with the player and Scorpions starts to play in my ear, one of their guitar ballads. Still Loving You, I think. 

I haven’t even outwardly voiced my approval, but Harrington looks smug. “See? I know real music. Now try to sleep.” 

“I _was_ sleeping,” I shoot back, but it’s half hearted. The music is good. I’ll never say it out loud, but it is. Alone by Ted Nugent begins. 

The tendrils of sleep are starting to pull me under, but I don’t want to go. I want to hear the rest of this tape. My eyes close. My breathing falls into a steady rhythm, but I’m not asleep. 

In the middle of the seventh song, Going to California, Led Zeppelin, I feel tentative fingers move a curl from my forehead. When I stay still, show no signs of wakefulness, they continue, long, lazy strokes through my hair. He thinks I'm sleeping. I allow it.

By the time the tape ends, a song I don’t recognize, I’m almost numb from how at peace I feel. I let the hands continue until I fall deeply asleep. I don’t have any nightmares. 

In the morning, I get out of bed to find Harrington in the kitchen, looking out the window, drinking coffee, the radio playing behind him. “It’s Christmas Eve.” I say. 

“Huh?” He looks startled. 

“That’s what the radio just said. December 24th. That diner open on holidays?”  
“Um. Yeah?”

“Okay, I’m getting us pancakes.”

“What?” God, he’s slow. 

“It’s Christmas Eve. I don’t get to do nice things on holidays and I’m doubting you do either. So. Pancakes. Be back in a few.” I pick up my keys. 

I’m almost out the door when I turn around. “What was that last song on the tape? I didn’t know it.” 

“Love My Way, The Psychedelic Furs. Didn’t think it’d be your style, so I saved it til last- Hey!” The realization hits him. “You weren’t _asleep_?” He’s incredulous. 

I walk out the door, smirking. “I’ll be back, pretty boy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The mental image of Steve going through the discography of all Billy's favorite bands just to find some calmer songs makes me scream so uh, thought I'd throw that into your brains too. I'll release a track list in the beginning notes of next chapter, incase you guys want to listen.


	8. Have Some Sympathy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, the tracklist from the mixtape steve makes for billy to sleep to.   
> Still Loving You- Scorpions  
> Alone- Ted Nugent  
> Fade to Black- Metallica  
> Ride On- AC/DC  
> Revelation (Mother Earth)- Ozzy Osbourne  
> Babe I'm Gonna Leave You- Led Zeppelin  
> Going to California- Led Zeppelin  
> (Don't Fear) The Reaper- Blue Oyster Cult  
> Not Now John- Pink Floyd  
> Love My Way- The Psychedelic Furs
> 
> Also I'm sorry this chapter took so long! I worked on it every day but it just took awhile. Finally knocked out the rest of it today because the opportunity for new comments/interaction was too tempting to pass up. I hope you guys like it!! I'll upload again soon, thank you so much for continuing to read. It means the world to me!!

“Christmas is the time of forgiveness, ya know,” Harrington says around a mouthful of pancakes, stabbing more onto his fork, syrup dripping into a pool on the kitchen table. We almost always eat in front of the television, but. Special occasion and all that. 

“Okay. I forgive you for not being as cool as me.” 

He rolls his eyes at my wolfish smile. “How do I deserve your kindness? But… I’m also a very forgiving person.”

I scoff. “Yeah, picked up on that when I realized you were still best friends with the bitc- the girl who cheated on you. AND the guy she cheated on you with.”

“Because she _apologized_.” He’s grinning at me like he’s caught me, like he’s got my caged against a wall and I can’t get away now. I don’t know why though except- 

“Harrington, _no_.” There’s horror across my face. 

“Hargrove, you won’t believe how forgiving I am. Your jaw will drop. If I could just maybe… maybe hear those two little words.”

Of course I feel guilt over the fact that we fought, that I almost killed him, that I didn’t even play fair. Of course that's worsened by the fact that he’s given everything to me regardless of that- regardless of all the ways I’ve hurt him and the way I never apologized, just gnawed at the shards of kindness he threw to me like meat scraps to a dog. But no one has ever given me a fucking apology. 

But maybe that’s because I have never deserved one, not the way Harrington does. 

I don’t give him two words, I give him four. “I bought you pancakes.” 

_A door creaks open. Marlboro Reds land softly on my floor._

His lips twitch. “Uh huh. And thank you for that.” He looks like he’s expecting something else and I can’t. I can’t give him that. 

Something in his expression shifts. “Right. Thanks, we’re cool, dude. Thanks.” He looks genuine, like he means it. Like in some way he understands that that’s it, that was the apology. That was the amends he was searching for. And he not only understands, but accepts.

I feel uneasy, so I jolt the conversation away, to a place that maybe he’ll hate, but I’ve gotta veer somehow. “So. Christmas Eve. Parents comin’ home? Should I make myself scarce?”

“They usually turn up at some point. Haven’t missed a Christmas so far, miraculously.” He sighs. “You don’t have to, like, leave though. You can hide out in my room, God knows they won’t notice.”

It should be more upsetting that the idea of spending Christmas day by myself in Harrington’s room sounds more desirable than being near my own family. 

“Or you could, ya know, just join us.”

Now that was out of left field. “They wouldn’t care that a kid who wants to smash their Patsy Cline records is crashing their holiday?”

He laughs. “I mean, maybe don’t tell them that. But it doesn’t really matter if they care. It would make the day interesting at least. Hell, maybe even dad’ll look at me. Having _your_ ass here might give him enough of a shock to remember I exist.” He clears his throat like he’s revealed too much.

“You’re gonna have to step up the daddy issues if you think that was a confession.” 

The phone rings.  
The quip on Harrington’s tongue fades along with his smile as he stands up to get it. He answers with his usual “Harrington Residence” and then his eyes flit to me as he says “Oh, yeah hi. Yeah, Merry Christmas. Now isn’t… now’s not a good time.” 

It’s probably one of his brats, but that wouldn’t explain the way his body is fidgeting uncomfortably, shooting quick looks my way and then shifting his gaze to anything but. 

“Uh huh. He’s… yes he is.” A pause. “Christ, yes, he’s here, but like he’s _right here_ so can I call you back?” Another pause. “We’re both fine. Merry Christmas. Goodbye.”

At this point his back is completely turned away from me and it’s a good damn thing. I feel sick and I can’t keep the panic off my face. It was Neil. Max must’ve found out I was here and told him and no- no that doesn’t make sense because I don’t think Harrington would be quite so civil if it was my dad and-

“Harrington.” My voice is a little choked and I hate myself for it.

He slowly turns around, his appearance almost guilty. But when his eyes meet mine he must register the panic there. “Hey, what’s wrong?” 

_What’s wrong?_ My dad knows where I am and cares enough about punishing me for leaving that he’s calling around and I thought he was gonna let me go quietly but now I might quite literally have hours to live or at least still have the ability to walk. 

“ _Billy._ ” Harrington’s voice is urgent now. “Billy, man, breathe. It was just Hopper.

And now I’m really fucking confused. “Hopper?”

“Yeah. Hopper. He was just checking in and saying Merry Christmas. Knows my parents aren’t around much. Asked if my parents are home. I lied, said they were.” 

“Oh.” I say. But something feels wrong. Because as much as I hate it, I know Harrington, hard not to when we live under the same damn roof. I know when he’s lying. And he wasn’t lying on the phone- is lying now.

I replay the conversation. 

_He’s here. We’re both fine._

“Fuck you, you’re lying.” It would almost be funny, the way his face falls, if anger wasn’t starting to build in me. I don’t like whatever is going on. “Why would Hopper care if I were here?” 

His thumb and forefinger pinch the bridge of his nose like a headache is coming on and it hits me. 

_Tell someone, kid. A friend._

That fucking bastard of a cop. 

“I’m living here because the sheriff told you to take me in?” I roar. I’m on my feet now, my hands slamming on the table, sticking there from the tiny pools of syrup dotting the wood. 

Harrington is trying to stay calm. “He didn’t tell me to do anything, can you just let me explain-”

The fucking note with an address. The drive to the hospital. The rides to school and the meals. Christ, even the fucking mixtape. Even-

Even his hands brushing the curls off my forehead. 

At no point has Hawkin’s King ever fucking cared about me. A fatass, nosy cop forced him to let me live here. Probably has something on him. I showed up in this town late to the party, but I know Harrington used to be fun, used to get into trouble. And Hopper knows that, probably threatened to tell his parents about all of his old exploits if he didn’t open up his doors to the poor little boy whose daddy hits him. 

I don’t even realize that I’m walking out the door until the cold whips across my face. I think I can hear Harrington shouting for me to wait, to come back. 

By the time I reach Cherry Lane, see my house get larger in my vision as the Camaro speeds closer, I’m almost numb with cold, never having rolled the windows up after the three cigarettes I smoked. Maybe that numbness has leeched through the surface of my skin and into my brain. It must’ve, if my subconscious has brought me _here_. If my subconscious believes that the humiliation of being Harrington’s obligation, just like one of the prepubescent children he babysits, is worse than the humiliation of crawling back home. 

Because being Harrington’s obligation is decidedly worse than being the object of his pity. My father lost respect for me long before I understood what it meant for a parent to respect a child. And if there’s one thing I had gained in this town, it was the begrudging respect of my peers, of Harrington, and now I’ve lost even that. So yes, _here_ is better- where I have no one's respect left to lose. 

Lesser of two evils or not, there’s still a strong chance Neil might actually kill me, so I start by walking around the back of the house and tapping softly on Max’s window. 

After a few moments the shade shoots up and a freckled face stares down at me. Though after recognition strikes it, the freckled face moreso _scowls_ down at me. 

The window opens. “Oh, this is rich. Fucking rich.” 

I’ve never seen Max look so furious. Harrington was wrong to say that she was worried, that she missed me. He probably pulled that out of his ass like everything else he’s said and done over the past few weeks. 

I blink away that spiral of thoughts, the one I spent an entire car ride trying to avoid, the one in which I realize how stupid I was to think for a second someone would want me around without the threat of something worse hovering over them. “Let me in, Maxine. Please?”

Her scowl is unwavering but the window opens wide enough for me to clamber in, even though it proves a challenge since she won’t even give me a fucking hand up. “Christ, Merry Christmas to you too.” I mutter as I ungracefully tumble into her room.

“Oh, _don’t_ you dare.” She hisses. 

“What crawled up your ass?”

The fury on her face intensifies. It would be impressive if she didn’t look so much like a Hargrove- like me, like him. “Fuck you.” 

“Fuck you,” I spit back, but I don’t even know why. I don’t know why she’s acting like this at all. 

It takes all of about three seconds for me to find out, though. 

“You. We were just starting to- we. We were doing well for the first time since you were in, like, fucking middle school! We weren’t being nice, but we’re not ever nice, but. We were trying. And then! And then you just fucking left. I had no idea where you were and Neil sure as shit wasn’t gonna go out looking for you. I didn’t know if you had left me for California or if you had killed yours-” 

Finally her voice, which has been a hushed yell, cracks, breaks right in half. Her fists start punching my stomach. They weren’t the ones I was expecting when I came here, but somehow they hurt more. Because I think she’s crying now as she repeats Fuck you, I hate you over and over with each blow. 

“Shit, Max.” I say. It’s not enough. My fingers rest on her shoulders, holding her in what could maybe be a hug, if we were the hugging type and if clenched fists weren’t still a storm on my abdamon. 

That’s not enough either. 

“I. I came back for Christmas,” I say lamely. 

“What do you want me to do, _thank you_?” She growls. “Thank Lord baby Jesus, my piece of shit brother came back to me after weeks of being M.I.A.?”

All in one breath she’s called me a piece of shit _and_ her brother. She’s called this- whatever this is right now- me coming back to her. 

My hands tighten around her shoulders in what I hope is comforting and not threatening. “I shouldn’t of done that, Mad Max. Should’ve told you.”

“Why did you go? Because of the concussion? We could’ve just told Hopper…” 

I let out a sharp laugh, cruel not towards her, but towards the fucking universe. Cause Hopper’s known this whole time and hasn’t done a damn thing besides hire me a babysitter. “No I- I left because of you.”

Rage overtakes her again and I wince in preparation for the hit about to land on me. “Hey- hey! Stop that. Not because you did something wrong, shitbird. I was leaving so you’d get some damn peace around here.” 

Her fist stops. “You… you heard my mom and I talking that night before the dance, huh? Right before you left?” 

“Yeah I just. Wanted you to not have to grow up around this shit. Around parents who hit kids. Didn’t want ya turning out all violent and mean like me.” I rub at my chest. “Guess it didn’t work though, some of those punches weren’t half bad, you little shit.” 

She’s almost smiling now. “Next time you’re pulling a protective big brother stunt, can you let me know? Cause this peace you were trying to give me wasn’t super affective when I thought you were dead.” 

“Nah, not dead. Just sleepin’ in my car and eating more french fries than you could imagine.” I don’t know why I lie. 

“Well, I was worried.” 

I grimace. _Worried._ Harrington was right and I want to kill him for it. 

\---

Max assures me that staying for Christmas is _fine_ , that Neil hasn’t been so foul tempered recently. Though I’m almost positive that this lift in his spirits has to be a direct result of the longest amount of time he’s gone without seeing my face in years, I let myself believe her. 

And it’s not like she’s entirely wrong- me being here is _fine_. Because the route Neil decides to take is pretending that I don’t exist, never meeting my eye or acknowledging me- all through Christmas Eve dinner and all through Christmas Day, through Max opening her presents as I sit with my back against the couch, sticking around because she asks me to, through helping her put the new wheels she receives on her skateboard and watching her ride til the sun is just beginning to set, the sky still golden with afternoon. 

So yes, it’s fine that I’m here. _Fine_ because my father isn’t trying to murder me with his fists after my disappearing act. _Fine_ because for once he’s leaving me alone. 

Not so _fine_ because he clearly harbored no concern for where his son went or why he left or why he came back. 

Honestly, maybe a blow to my jaw would be a kinder Christmas gift from him. He could put a bow on his fists, make it festive. It’d be better than the confirmation that the final string that tied us as father and son was him needing someone to hit and me being around. Available. Punchable. 

Shit. 

I walk to the curb where Max is practicing some move that I forgot the name of the moment she told me. “I don’t wanna stay here.” 

She looks up at me. “Where do you wanna stay?” 

I push down thoughts of glass doors and Chinese food leftovers and watching Bond flicks and a warm body next to me at night.

I’ll stay in my car. If I had more than eight fucking dollars I’d go to California. “Motel, maybe,” is all I say out loud. 

“Can I at least visit you this time? You won’t just disappear again?” 

I bat her head with the back of my hand, gently, only enough to mess up her hair. “Nah shitbird, but I’ll visit you. Pick you up from school some days if ya want. Just can’t stay here.” 

“I’ll help you pack.” 

\---  
I’m in the lot of that same old abandoned building. The back of the Camaro is filled with a haphazard stack of my belonging- the majority of my clothes, a small shoebox containing the few bits of California that I have, two joints I found in the back of my closet that Tommy must’ve given me months ago, and all of my cassettes that weren’t already in my car. 

The only other thing to bring along was a jacket Susan pressed into my hands on my way out the door. It’s leather and lined with a hooded sweatshirt, warm, but not like those puffy monstrosities that everyone in the Midwest seems to have resigned themselves to wearing. Max must’ve helped her pick it. 

The sound of tires on gravel register in my ears over the sound of Metallica and look into my rear mirror and groan. 

Because there’s a fucking Beamer pulling into the lot behind me. Christ. 

Harrington’s car is blocking my exit from the lot, so I can do nothing but sit and watch as he walks toward my window, the knuckle of his index finger knocking twice, softly. 

“Fuck off, Harrington.” I sigh through the glass. 

He knocks again. I roll the glass down. Of course I do. 

He rest his elbows on the slit where the pane just disappeared. He actually has the audacity to smile, albeit sheepishly. I glare. 

“Wouldn’t ya know, there’s a first time for everything?” 

I look back at him, not getting it, waiting for him to continue. 

He does. Always a talker. “My parents. They never showed up for Christmas. So. Like I said. First time for everything.” 

“That’s sad, pretty boy. Just awful.” I respond, expressionless, emotionless. _Idon'tcareIdon'tcareIdon'tcare._

Harrington sighs. “Look. I’ll explain everything. I know you’re thinking that Hopper, I don’t know, _made me_ reach out to you or something. But it’s not like that at all. Just come home and I’ll explain.” 

I’m silent. 

“Don’t make me spend Christmas alone. Come home, man.” 

That’s the second time now that he’s called his house "home" in a way that makes it sound like my home. Or, our home, actually. It makes my chest kick. “Christ, don’t _grovel_ , pretty boy. I don’t like meek people.” I think the corners of my mouth may be turned up, but only slightly. 

“Scoot over, Hargrove. I’m the driver, remember?” Harrington’s grin is wild as I reluctantly shift to the passenger seat and he climbs into the driver’s. 

“I don’t think I’m concussed anymore, asshole.” I grumble.

“Oh, I’m sure you aren’t. But I think your car likes me more now. Don’t you honey?” He asks, stroking the Camaro’s wheel. 

He’s only gotten one foot back in the door of my good graces and he’s pulling this shit. I swat his hand away in the middle of its continued caress up and down the wheel. “Don’t you think you owe me an explanation or two before you start sexually harrassing my car?” 

Fingers that are getting too practiced for my taste turn the Camaro’s key and ease the car around to the back of the building, to an exit I didn’t know existed for all the time I’ve spent here, and out of the lot. 

“Your car likes my music better too.” 

“Okay pretty boy, I change my mind. Go back to groveling. Because you do not sound like someone trying to make amends.” I’m annoyed, but there’s some part of my brain that’s rebelling against my grudge- a part that wants to laugh at his cockiness. A part that is joyous that I get to go back. Back home with him. 

He pulls a tape out of his jacket pocket, hits eject on Metallica, inserts his own tape into the player. I’m trying to fight his hands from their action, ignoring Harrington’s protests of _I’m gonna crash, you dick,_ when the opening notes of The Stroke by Billy Squire start trickling out of the speakers. “Is this your tape?” 

He looks smug. “Mhm. Now hush will you?” 

This day is already weird, Harrington playing a half decent song being the weirdest part, so I do. 

The tape is getting progressively worse, but I let it keep playing with only minimal grumbling. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I let Harrington get away with a lot of the things he does. 

“Stop!” I snap suddenly. “Pull over.” 

“God, Hargrove, I’ll turn the music off. You don’t have to get out of the damn car-” 

That’s not it though. There’s a Christmas tree on the side of the road, on it’s side a half dead, maybe it fell off of someone’s car roof a few days ago. “I want that tree.” 

“Uh. What?” Harrington asks, confused. Rightfully so, for once. 

“Do you have chords we can use to tie it to the roof?” I ask, already getting out of the car and standing the tree up vertically. 

The drivers side door opens and he steps out, coming to help me. “Yeah, but why do you want this shitty tree?” 

“Because your dad is shit and my dad is shit and it’s Christmas and I think it’d be funny if we dragged this piece of shit in your living room full of expensive furniture. I don’t know.” 

“Um. Yeah, alright.” He says, helping me knot the tree to the roof, no further questions asked. 

\---

“It’s a damn good tree.” Harrington sighs, wiping his mouth of the gravy from the diner’s Christmas roast beef platter that sits in a takeout container on his lap. 

“Told you it fuckin’ would be,” I say. 

We dug a tree stand out of his basement full of even more expensive shit and set the tree up in the center of the living room. The needles are brown in some places and it smells less of pine and more of roadside. And it makes me grin to look at it. 

“Now. You wanna try to convince me that I’m not living here as some favor to your cop friend?” 

Harrington laughs, a little too hard. I give him a look. “Sorry,” he gets out, still laughing. “It’s just the idea of Hopper ever being my _cop friend_ is so funny he-” A hiccup. “God I think he hates me.” 

“Not really the explanation I’m lookin for.” 

“Right, right.” His tone sobers. “Look, I…do you remember the Monday after the last time you punched me in the face?”

I wince at the fact that there’s been more than one occasion, but I nod. 

“Well, remember how I wasn’t at practice? You probably don’t remember that actually.” I do. I don’t say so. “I was at the station, talking to Hopper. Asking him about… about why you’d want to be taken to the station instead of- well, anyway. He didn’t tell me anything, but I could pick up on what he, like, wasn’t saying. We both knew you needed help but that you’d never let him help you. So we just kind of thought that maybe it’d be best if _I_ tried.”

I glare at him. This doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a place far from pity.

“Okay, no. I _asked_ him if I could help. I don’t like being alone, okay Hargrove? I know you’re kind of the worst.” He wrinkles his nose. “You’ve beat the shit out of me twice and your music is really annoying and you keep doing that fucking tongue-waggling thing.” I let my tongue do the move in question. “Yeah, that. But once I knew what your dad did to you it just… I don’t know, it made sense, the way you act. And now that I know you more, I think you’re okay to be around. So you can drop this idea that I’m doing this because I feel bad for you or because someone is forcing me to. I want you here, okay?” 

It’s too much. I don’t feel things for other people. Girls are fun for a night and their beds are a good place to stay to avoid Neil. Boys will follow me around to try to leech popularity or status off of me and I let them. I like Max, I think. I loved my mom, I loved Beth, but they were taken. So Harrington saying this shit is too much.

I let an easy grin spread across my face. “I brought us a little something, Harrington.” 

Anything to let the feeling of attachment stop coursing through my veins, thoughts of getting to sleep next to him again stop coursing through my mind. I pull one of Tommy’s two joints out of my pocket. 

Harrington laughs. “So, are we good then?” 

“Sure. Just pass me your lighter.” Push it down, push it away. 

He hands over his zippo and I press the joint to my lips, hold the flame to the end and take a deep breath. 

“I don’t know if this is supposed to be my Christmas gift, but I have something for you too.” Harrington says, pulling yet another object out of the pocket of his winter coat that’s sitting between us on the couch. He hands over a small metal container. It’s a box of toothpicks. I look at him, questioningly. 

“Since I don’t let you smoke in the house.” He looks at the joint between my lips. “Cigarettes, that is. You’re always biting at your lips without them, so I thought chewing on these might help.” He frowns. “I don’t know what to do about you when you sleep though. That’s when you chew your lips the most, but you’d probably choke on the toothpick.”

I squirm at being seen by him. I didn’t even know I chewed at my lips, the metallic taste of blood on the inside of my mouth from the cuts as familiar as my favorite albums and my dad’s fists. 

Again, I push the feelings away. “You want a hit, pretty boy?” I pass the joint over, but he doesn’t take it. 

“I’ve never smoked before.” With an admission like that I’d expect him to look embarrassed, but he’s just looking into my eyes.

I laugh. “Bullshit. You were Hawkin’s King and you never smoked? I got this from your old best friend, for Christ’s sake.” 

“Nah, Tommy was the only one in our group who smoked. He’d babybird it to Carol or Nicole sometimes though.” 

I’m smirking hard now. “He’d _what_ , princess?”

“ … Babybird the smoke?” He looks at me like I’m not getting it. “Like he’d take a hit and then exhale it into her mouth-”

“I know what _shotgunning_ is, you idiot.” I don’t know if it’s just a Midwest phrase or a Harrington phrase, but it conjures up a funny image in my mind, so I laugh more. 

“Oh shut _up_.” He huffs, folding his arms. “Means the same thing. He was trying to ease them into being high… or maybe he was just trying to get his mouth on them, I don’t know.” 

“I’ve done it for plenty of girls. Trust me, it’s the second option.” I say, thinking back to parties and hot rooms and the clamber of people around me, like it’s been ages since I’ve been to one, even though it’s only been a few weeks. 

“It does work though, right? Makes you not get as high?” 

I think. “I guess? I don’t know.” He’s eyeing me. “Harrington, _no_.” 

“Okay, fine then. Smoke alone.” He says, smiling smugly to himself. 

I weigh the benefits of a night high with Harrington against the drawback I’ve what I’ll have to do to get there. Christ, he’s a piece of work. 

“Just _one_. Once you’re used to the feeling, you can take your own damn hit.” Before I can think too hard about it, my fingers are dragging the joint back up between my lips and I’m inhaling. “Over here, pretty boy.” I grunt around the smoke in my lungs. His eyes are wide in amusement and something like satisfaction. He leans toward me and my index and thumb hold his jaw steady. His lips part and I roll my eyes. I consider huffing it in too quickly, making him cough and splutter, but I’m only doing this once and I want it to work. 

Slowly, tendrils of smoke escape from between my lips into his, which are soft and pink, almost like a girls. I don’t know why I’m thinking that, but the moment is going on too long and it’s strangely intimate in a way that I don’t understand and for some reason the thought of his fingers tangled in my hair when he thought I was asleep is pounding behind my eyes. 

I’m out of smoke to give, out of air. My mouth and fingers release him. 

He looks breathless and a little teary eyed and I think the smoke must be getting to him. “Okay?” I ask. 

“Yeah.” He breathes. “Fine.” 

I take a hit for myself and pass the joint to him. “All you, princess.” 

\---

It’s fun being high with him. We pass the joint back and forth between us til it’s dead. He’s picked it up impressively well after that first hit, but he does smoke a lot of cigarettes. Everytime he accidentally touches me I can feel the impact for minutes after he’s pulled away. I don’t remember where I’m going with a lot of the stories I begin, but he keeps asking for more anyway. 

We talk about music. I find out that the tape he played today is all of his current favorite songs, but he mostly likes the 50s and the 60s. I tell him that I like the music I like because when I listen to it I can’t think, which is something I didn’t even know was true before I said it. 

“Well then you must not spend a lot of time thinking, cause you’ve always got that shit on.” He says with a dopey smile I’ve never seen before. 

It’s supposed to be a dig, but it’s true. “No, I honestly don’t. I probably would’ve figured out this Hopper shit way sooner if I ever let myself think, but I don’t. I wake up and I think about what I need to do that day- what shit I have to do for Max, what shit I promised my dad I’d get done. How much gas is left in the car and how far I can get on it before I need to hit the station again. Remembering to work out so that I can get a date for the weekend and kick your ass in basketball.” I give a light kick to his shin and he rolls his eyes. “But I don’t let myself _think_.” 

“Why not? Not that I’m complaining, it’s probably for the best that no one looks too closely and starts trying to figure me out.” 

“I’d be too, I don’t know, sad all the time.” I grin peevishly, even though it doesn’t quite match the conversations’ tone. “Instead I’m just an angry dick.” 

His smile is soft. “You’re not a dick when you’re here.” 

“Is that a challenge, Harrington? You’ve got a pool out there I’d be more than happy to chuck you in to.” 

No response, just those doe eyes peering at me. 

“I don’t know, pretty boy. Maybe I’m just not looking over my shoulder all the time when I’m here. I can just kinda exist.” 

“That’s good.” He says. 

Yeah. Good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The mixtape steve played in billy's car:   
> the stroke- billy squire  
> rebel rebel- bowie  
> just like heaven- the cure  
> pretty in pink- psychedelic furs   
> i melt with you- modern english  
> heart of glass- blondie  
> working for the weekend- loverboy  
> dancing in the dark- bruce springsteen  
> hold me now- thompson twins  
> pale blue eyes- velvet underground


	9. And All the Sinners Saints

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm actually really proud of this chapter :,) I still feel self conscious about my writing but I think the feel of this chapter is what I wanted it to be. Your likes and comments bring me more joy than you could ever know, so please continue to leave them if you feel so inclined! Sending so much love to everyone and most of all to Billy Hargrove, who really just deserves more.

Harrington is right- I’m not a dick when I’m at his house, when we eat every meal together and laugh at the same stupid movies and wake up in the same bed and see what sleep has done to the other’s hair in the night without product to keep the stray strands in place. 

My comfort, my ease, living here would be jarring enough. But I also don’t feel so goddamn angry all the time and that’s what makes the whole thing damn near unnerving. Because now there is room in my brain to think about things besides the bare essentials to survival and I don’t know if I quite like it, if I’m honest. 

Because I think of Beth and the way she sparkled, her hair whipping in the wind from the Camaro’s open windows, screaming the words to some Judas Priest song. Of the way I had never seen her look so broken the night that her old man made her leave me, when he caught her with that Jen girl. The way she looked so deep into my eyes that I thought she was looking through me when the last words she said before disappearing forever were _You be careful, Billy Goat, be smart. You’re the smart one._ And how I still have no idea what she wanted me to be careful and smart about, how the words make me feel sick when they ring through my head anyway. 

Because I think of my mom and the way that she would let me place me feet on top of hers and wrap my arms around her waist and she’d hold me tight and sway back and forth to a song in the kitchen when Neil wasn’t home and I’d feel weightless, moving without having to work my muscles, just allowing her to rock me. Of the way Neil would call her a whore and I didn’t know what it meant, but knew it made my mom cry. The way she left me with him even when I begged her not to, how I’d call her until her new phone line disconnected, and how maybe sometimes that makes me hate her more than him. 

Because I also think about Harrington and the way that that’s maybe the strangest thing for me to think about. But it’s hard not to when he’s gone out of his way to give me a place to stay and made me a mixtape to try to drive away nightmares that clearly aren’t as bad as his own and got his fingers tangled in my hair when he thought I was sleeping. I don’t understand him. He’s intrinsically good and it makes me feel safe and it makes me feel uneasy and it makes me want to be around him and it makes me want to punch him in the face. 

I think, maybe, that I fucking hate thinking. 

“You’re not what I expected, Hargrove.” It’s raining this morning, thick icy sheets of wet from the sky, the Indiana December inexplicably not cold enough for real snow. Harrington is looking at me over his cup of coffee from where he leans his back against the counter. 

“How so?” I grumble, still too tired for any of his cryptic bullshit this morning. Because he’s not what I expected either. He’s not the _King Steve_ he was before I moved here, the guy that everyone at school won’t let him forget he used to be. And he’s not as reserved as I thought when I first met him, when I could push and push and never get a rise out of him. No. He’s silly in a way that makes me think _Yeah, this guy used to be popular, this guy used to make people love him_ and he’s haunted in a way that makes me think _And this is why he’s not anymore, because no one ever wants to deal with someone complicated._ Because we’re both complicated and we both know it and yet we skate on the surface of knowing and never really talk about it. Until now, apparently. 

“I don’t know,” He sighs, answering my question. “You’re not as _lethal_ as you want everyone to believe.” 

A small smile is tugging at his lips, but I only glare. 

He laughs. “See? Like that. You can stand there and stare at me like you want to kill me til the cows come home, Billy. But I know you’re not gonna hurt me. You just want me to think that you are.” 

“I have beaten the shit out of you twice.” 

“Yeah. But you also wanted to eat pancakes on Christmas Eve and you fucking _giggle_ when we watch movies and you put you thumb on your lips when you’re sleeping. I don’t know man, you don’t seem lethal to me.” He gasps, theatrically, like an incredible thought has just hit him. “I… I think you’re just a… a person! Wait til Hawkins hears this! Under the denim and leather and the fancy car, Billy Hargrove is just a person! One who sucks his thumb in his sleep.” 

I’ve crossed the room and I’ve got him in a headlock. “Come here, shitbird.” I say as my knuckles muss his hair, but he’s still laughing. 

“Girls won’t be all over you when they find out what a softie you are, huh?” 

I shove him away, but I’m laughing now too. “Yeah? You really think they’ll all come flocking back to you and your dry spell will be over if you feed ‘em all kinds of lies about me?” 

“First of all, they are not lies. Second, my dry spell is voluntary.” He considers me a moment. “And you’re one to talk. I don’t think you’ve gotten with one girl since you’ve started living here and it’s been, like, weeks.”

I scowl because he does not need to know that it’s been maybe closer to a month since I’ve fucked anyone. “I’ve been concussed. Don’t want all that noise and movement messing up my pretty little head.” I joke. 

Harrington rolls his eyes and pretends to gag. “You’re disgusting.” Then he tilts his head, a funny look on his face, almost a smirk. “You don’t even- where have you been… _ya know_?” 

“Where have I been _what_ , pretty boy?” I ask, even though I can almost guess what he means. 

“You _know_ ,” he says, curling his hand into a tunnel and waving it up and down. 

I choke on my coffee. “Are you asking me where I’ve been in your house I’ve been jerking off?” Like it’s a normal question to ask over breakfast a few days after Christmas. 

His face is bright red, but through the embarrassment he’s still chuckling. “Well it sure as hell isn’t before you go to sleep, I think I’d know.” What he doesn’t say is _Because I sleep next to you every night._

There’s some part of me taking joy in how uncomfortable he looks. “In the _shower_ , you idiot.” 

He gets even redder and it looks like he regrets bringing it up at all. But he did. And I may not be a dick when I’m around him, but I’m an asshole always and God is it funny to watch him squirm. “What about you, King Steve? Where in the palace do you-?” 

“In my room before I go to sleep.” He spits out, looking like he’d rather die than continue this conversation. 

Now it’s my turn to be uncomfortable, though I do my best to conceal it, to let the teasing smirk stay on my lips. Because there’s something about him doing _that_ before he crawls between my sheets and falls asleep five inches away from that makes my stomach tug, makes me feel uncharacteristically awkward. 

My fingers close around a sugar cube from the ornate bowl on his mother’s kitchen table and I toss it at him, trying to ease the unwelcome tension. It startles him, but he picks it up from where it landed on the counter and pops it between his lips as I say, “We should fix this dry spell problem.”

He looks alarmed. “Um. What did you have in mind?” 

The menacing grin that I know looks so good on me takes over my face. “It’s New Year’s Eve, pretty boy. Let’s go to a party.” 

\---

We’re getting ready in the same bathroom and the air is thick with the steam from the shower Harrington just got out of and the scent of honey from his _organic shampoo_ and the sticky taste of _Farrah Fawcet_ hair spray. He makes this shit too easy sometimes.

“Harrington. We’re supposed to be getting chicks tonight, not turning into them.” As if proving my point I tilt my bottle of cologne, Paco Rabanne, the only scent in the bathroom besides cigarette smoke that doesn’t smell like a housewife, onto my wrists. 

“Hey, girls like when a guy smells good.” He frowns. 

“Agreed.” I say, my grin in opposition to his grimace as I push the excess cologne from my wrists down the front of my jeans. 

“You’re _awful_.” He says, eyes following the movement of my hands in something that’s maybe disgust.  
I pull my hand back out from between my waist and my belt and pat him on the cheek, making him blush. “No. I’m considerate. Now come on, let’s go. We’ll go see for ourselves which the girls prefer.”

He follows me out of the bathroom, looking dumbstruck as we grab our jackets and head to the Camaro. 

When we arrive at the party, another one of Tina’s, we park a few houses down so we can put some distance between us, have some plausible deniability about arriving together. 

I walk in the door a minute or so behind Harrington, Sunglasses At Night blaring so loudly through a set of speakers that it’s more bass than discernible lyrics. Harrington is already lost in the crowd so I busy myself with grabbing a beer from the kitchen, popping the tab. 

“Hargrove!” It’s Tommy, staggering towards me with Carol hanging off his arm. “Haven’t seen you around much, man.”

“You been lost without me?” I joke, but it’s a little too on the nose, rings a little too true to the fact that Tommy needs someone to follow around, to lead him, and I’ve been just short of M.I.A. since before winter break. 

He gives a tight smile, trying to mask any hurt. “Nah. Just making sure some priss didn’t turn you bitch or something, keepin’ you on a short leash and away from the kegs.” 

“Who do I look like? Harrington?” I ask with a forced cruel laugh. “Gimme a break.” 

Tommy guffaws at that, always so happy to talk shit on his old best friend, or maybe just talk about him at all. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you out back. See if you can break your own record.” 

It’s a bit of a relief that I can disappear and still return naturally to the space I’ve carved for myself here, that I don’t even need to be talking down to guys and feeling up girls everyday to maintain my title of Keg King. It speaks more to the mundanity of Hawkins than to my social skills, but I’ll take it. Because it feels natural for Tommy to be holding my ankles as I choke down shitty beer from the keg in Tina’s backyard and for the small crowd braving the icy cold to be shouting _Billy! Billy! Billy!_ as I break a record that was already mine to begin with. 

But it doesn’t feel natural that I find myself almost lonely without Harrington next to me, without his stupid comments in my ear, without his eyes following me. I didn’t realize how accustomed to his presence I’ve gotten and that in and of itself feels as foreign as the cold, muddy planes of the midwest. I’m usually so used to being by myself- surrounded by admirers- but always alone.

After Tommy has released my legs and I go back into the sticky warmth of the party I do see Harrington, but he’s not looking at me. He’s shooting pained, quick glances over to the couch where Wheeler is practically straddling Byers, kissing him deeply. I sidle up next to Harrington. “And here I thought she was some priss.” 

He jumps at my voice suddenly in his ear, but doesn’t turn to look at me. “She can be very… passionate. When she wants to be.”

It’s something adjacent to anger in my chest at the wistfulness in his voice as he says it. “When did that happen anyway? You two were a thing when I first got here and suddenly she was running off with the freak.”

Harrington doesn’t chastise me for poking fun at Jonathan like he usually does, but I guess _usually_ Jonathan isn’t right in front of him, feeling up his ex-girlfriend. “That Halloween party where I met you for the first time.” He responds, his voice still distant. 

I don’t know what makes me say, “Why? She see me and get jealous? Knew she’d lose you to me?” 

It’s a joke, but it makes him look at me. “Does that sound better or worse than her never really loving me?” 

“How long were you two together?”

“A year.”

“Ouch. Then yeah. It's better." 

He gives me a dry smile. “Alright, Hargrove. Then yeah, she was jealous of you.” 

Just then a hand wraps around my upper arm. “You wanna dance, Billy?” 

My gaze falls to the body connected to the hand, to brown hair curling around the edges of a low cut top and to brown eyes meeting mine hungrily. My vision flits to Harrington who has busied himself with staring longingly at Nancy. “Sure I do, baby.” I respond to the girl, my voice all rough sugar. She begins to tug me away by my arm, but I quickly mutter into Harrington’s ear “Please, go get some pussy, pretty boy. It’ll make you feel better.” Because I can’t stand to see the love in his eyes for Nancy for one more goddamn second. 

We dance for awhile.The girl tells me her name is Jackie, that she’s in my English class, that she was hoping I’d be here tonight. “Why’s that, sweetheart?” I drawl by her ear as she grinds herself against my thigh to the music, hot bodies pressing up against us. 

“Because I’ve been wanting to get you alone for awhile now,” she breathes, lips moving to my neck and hand coming up to cup the zipper of my jeans. Christ. Not subtle, this one. 

“Aw. You want me to give you a kiss when that clock hits midnight? Wish you a Happy New Year and walk you home and take you on a date next weekend?” 

She rolls her eyes. “Funny, Hargrove.” But she’s giggling and pulling my hand. “Come on, let’s go upstairs. 

I’m following behind her, letting her lead the way up Tina’s staircase, but I steal a glance behind me, looking for Harrington, part of me hoping that he’s found some girl to fuck, another part hoping that he’s watching me go, meaning that I was right to tease that girls want me more than him, all of me hoping that he’s not still staring at Wheeler. 

Instead, I see Tommy in his face and, if Harrington’s expression is any indication, pressing on some Nancy-shaped wound. Irritation and deja vu sweep through me. Because here I am at a party, minutes away from fucking a girl, and yet getting distracted by Harrington. Except this time it’s not because I’m punching him in the face in Tommy’s backyard, but because I feel a wave of protectiveness over him. 

“Goddammit.” I sigh. “Some other time, okay Jackie?” 

She raises her eyebrows. “I’m holding you to that, Hargrove.” But I’m already walking back down the stairs, towards Harrington. 

“Honestly why’re you even _here_ man. No one wants to talk to some little bitch.” I can hear Tommy’s sneer even though his back is to me, his frame practically caging Harrington against the wall. “And there’s definitely no girls here who want anything to do with you.”

Harrington rolls his eyes. “Oh fuck off, Tommy, you’ve been fucking one girl for like four years now. Gimme a break.” 

I can’t help but laugh at that, at Harrington putting up a fight that I thought I’d have to put up for him. 

Tommy turns around, confused. “Something funny, Hargrove?” 

“Yeah, Hagan. You’re getting schooled by the _bitch_.” I say, meanly. Because I can. Because Tommy and I aren’t actually friends and me making fun of him doesn’t even have to mean allegiance to Harrington. Because when you aren’t really close with anyone, you can treat people however you want. 

“Oh fuck off.” He mutters, but starts backing off of Harrington. To him, he says, “Just get outta here.” 

Once Tommy has walked away, I focus on Harrington. “Looks like we got under his skin.” I say, trying at a smile. 

He avoids my gaze. “Whatever, Hargrove. Weren’t you busy?” He sounds angry, but more than that he sounds _drunk_. Definitely drunker than when I left him. 

“Hey, pretty boy, what’s with the attitude? 

“Just go fuck Jackie. She’s a good lay.” He sounds belligerent. 

“Alright, maybe I will.” My anger starting to rise to meet his. 

His face gets darker and he turns to walk away but stumbles into the wall. Oh, he’s drunk alright. 

_Christ._ I close my eyes and take a deep breath, reopen them on my exhale. “Come on, Harrington. Let’s get you home.” 

I move to grip his shoulder, steer him towards the door so he doesn’t fall again, but he shoves my hand away. “No, really, Billy. Go get your dick wet. Better than taking it out on the walls of my shower,” he slurs. 

“Harrington, will you shut the fuck up.” I growl. 

“Oh, right. Wouldn’t want anyone to know we’re friends or anything.” 

“Is that what this is about? Me calling you a bitch in front of Tommy? That was me _defending_ you, believe it or not.” And it was, even though it was also about keeping up the facade of our rivalry just for the sake of my pride. 

He stares up at me with so much pain that I take a step backwards. I renew my resolve. “Alright, enough of this.” I grab the back of his jacket and push him out of Tina’s front door. The cold has kept most people inside, so I don’t have to worry too much about anyone seeing us leave together. 

He’s stopped fighting me, just trips over his own feet as I navigate us to the Camaro. When I’ve finally deposited him in the front seat, buckled his seatbelt, and sped away, leaving the party in the dust way sooner than intended, I turn to him. “Why’re you fucked up like this? Cause of Nancy?” 

He looks at me with that same hurt. “Sure, Billy. Cause of Nancy.” 

I shake off the tightness in my chest that takes hold whenever he gets all upset over her. I’m not used to feeling pain for others and it’s unwelcome. 

The car is too silent so I flick on the speakers, starting my Metallica cassette, but as soon as it’s on, Harrington’s fingers are switching it off again. “Hey.” I shoot at him, but he just glares back at me. “You’re not usually an angry drunk, Harrington. Cut it out, it ain’t cute on you.” 

The rest of the ride is quiet except for the tension that seems tangible enough to be making noise- a low, dull tone, like the ringing in my ears when I turn off loud music too suddenly. 

I stop the car, parking it in front of his house. “Listen I’m-” I stop. “Look, if I upset you or whatever, I didn’t mean-” I take a cigarette from the pack in my pocket, light it, extend it to him. 

He takes it, but doesn’t look at me. Smokes the whole thing. “You don’t have to be sorry.” He says, even though I never said I was. “Come’on. Let’s go inside.” 

When we get upstairs, I don’t expect him to just walk right into my room with me. Usually he waits until he thinks I’m asleep and sneaks in, and anyway, he’s pissed off tonight, so the last thing I expect is for him to collapse onto my bed. 

“Can you put on a song for me? And like. Don’t give me shit for it, I’m not in the mood.” 

I wouldn’t have anyway. “Yeah, dude, sure. What’d you want?” 

“Vienna. Billy Joel. Cassette in my room, on the nightstand.” 

I retrieve it and come back, feed it into the stereo instead of the walkman so that we can both hear it. I don’t know it. I lay down next to him on the bed and it feels wrong, even though it’s the way we sleep every night, only now there’s no pretense that I’m asleep, that this is something I’m allowing to happen unknowingly. It’s _conscious_ now. 

The song’s opening piano notes begin and it’s nice, not like the hoppy Billy Joel they play on the radio. 

“My mom likes this one.” He says, staring at the ceiling. 

“Oh. That’s nice.” I say, not quite knowing how to be conversationally kind with anyone, but willing to try for him. Maybe I should respond with _I don’t know what songs and singers my mom likes. I was too young to ask what she was playing and now I can’t listen to anything that reminds me of her even if I wanted to because my stupid kid brain doesn’t remember any of the words_. I could say _Sometimes I don’t mind listening to your music cause I’m hoping something you play will be familiar, will be_ her _music_. But I don’t say either, I don’t say anything else. 

Harrington fills the silence, though. “I’m just really lonely.” 

I turn my head to look at him, but he’s still looking up at the ceiling, so I only catch his profile. Watch the moles on his neck and his jaw move when he speaks. “Nancy left. And I’m only really friends with a bunch of middle schoolers.” He gives a dry, humorless laugh. “And my fucking parents didn’t come home for Christmas. I miss them. I miss Tommy, even. I miss when I felt like I had people around, even if it wasn’t real. I wish… I wish everything hadn’t changed.” 

Harrington has money. A huge house. People who love him, probably, even if they aren’t close to him. We’re miles different, but I understand him. I know what it’s like to live in a house where no one is looking at you, no one is _seeing_ you. I know being alone. I know lonely. 

There’s something unspoken in the air. Something like _I’m not quite so lonely when I’m with you, except somehow I’m lonelier._ Something like _I understand you_. Something like _And I’m glad you understand me_. But I don’t know which one of us is thinking it, is refraining from saying it. 

I place one of the toothpicks from the tin on my nightstand between my teeth in case it’s me who’s not saying it, in case it’s me who’s about to say it. I close my mouth around the wood to block my tongue from moving, my lips from forming a sentence. 

Fireworks explode in the air and the sound of pots clashing against pans and of children’s voices pierce the air outside the bedroom window. 

“Happy New Year, Harrington.” 

Finally, he tears his eyes from the ceiling, looks over to me. “Yeah. Happy New Year, Hargrove.” 

His eyes are brown and they’re deep like there’s more than I’ll ever understand hiding behind them. They make me want to take his pain away, in the same way that it doesn’t hurt to move my body anymore because I haven’t gotten a new bruise in weeks. 

I feel too much, I push it down. Swallow it. “Your resolution can be to never cock block me again.” I say.

“Oh shut up,” he says, giving me a light shove. 

“I mean it, Harrington.” I say, smiling. “People at school are gonna start talking when the girls start missing me and it gets around that I haven’t nailed anyone in _weeks_.”

“Can it.” He says. But he’s suddenly leaning over me, tilting my jaw out of the way with one hand and pushing my shoulder down with the other. His lips reach my neck and he sucks, harshly. 

I mean to push him off, I mean to shout _Harrington_. But I just freeze. Just feel a strange warmth in my chest that shoots down to my stomach, to even lower. 

After another few moments pass, he pulls off, using his thumb to wipe away his saliva from my neck, looking down at me to examine the bruise. “There, you can quit your whining. That’ll keep the kids at school from finding out about your little dry spell until you can actually get with Jackie. I meant it earlier, dude, she’s a good lay.” 

That same feeling from earlier, the one from when he was looking at Nancy grips me, except that can’t be right because I’m not pitying him this time, not feeling his pain. 

Because no, this feeling isn’t sympathy or empathy. 

Vomit rises in my throat even though I barely drank anything tonight. 

This feeling is jealousy, thick and hot through my veins, taking root in my stomach. 

_Looking at yourself in the mirror like some…_

Allowing Harrington to sleep in my bed, to touch me. How it barely took any convincing from him for me to press my lips to his and blow smoke and my own breath into his lungs, how I was all too willing to give up fucking Jackie tonight just to make sure Tommy wasn’t being too cruel to him. 

_You be careful, Billy Goat, be smart. You’re the smart one._

How my jeans feel tight, have since about a half second after he first started sucking a bruise below my jaw. 

_Enjoying yourself, faggot?_

The vomit claws its way out of my mouth, escaping onto the floor beside me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I'll throw this in the notes of next chapter too, but I just wanted to ask: I have an idea for a shorter fic (Sympathy for the Devil is long, still awhile to go) in which Beth goes to Hawkins along with Billy and gets together with another lesbian we might know (but Harringrove is still present in the story). I'm also planning a Billy Post S3 recovery oneshot (also Harringrove). Would you guys have any interest in reading those? Let me know! Regardless, I'm not giving up on this one lol.


	10. Cause I’m in Need of Some Restraint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! In general, I trust that the umbrella triggers that I put at the beginning of the work cover everything but for this chapter, there is a scene on nonconsensual touching? Like I'm not sure exactly how I'd describe it beyond that, but if that's something that would upset you, please proceed with caution! I want my readers to be safe and okay.

It only took a week of knowing Beth for me to feel like she was inextricable from my life. Five days of surfing and skating and listening to music and saying things we had never said out loud before each other. 

We went to our first party together that weekend. I expected us to bide the time drinking and smoking, sitting on a couch and laughing as kids from our high school got a little too drunk and acted a little too stupid. And that is how it started. But after an hour or so, when she got up to refill our drinks, she took too long getting back, so I got up to find her. It took almost ten minutes of me asking around, checking different rooms, before I finally stumbled into a hallway, found her pinning some other girl’s wrists above her head, kissing at her neck, as the other girl moaned quietly, eyes fluttering. 

I wasn’t exactly shocked, if anything it made everything about her make some degree of sense. But I did hear Neil’s voice in my head, the way he went from calling me a pussy to calling me a faggot sometime around thirteen. I felt his fists that went along with it. And what he did to me -does to me- wasn’t even warranted, I hadn’t even done anything. 

I hadn’t shared a bed with a boy for weeks or gotten hard as he’d sucked a bruise onto my neck. 

So all I had really felt when I saw Beth was a feeling of protectiveness and even love, maybe. My father hated me and Susan and Max were suddenly in my house, in my life. If the one person who I was sure I loved wanted to be with girls, then that was fine. It made sense, even. I thought it made sense to me because _Who wouldn’t want to be with girls?_ but maybe it made sense because- 

Jesus fuck. 

A warm hand sits firm between my shoulders. “...Billy? Billy? Jeez, man, you alright?” The voice has been trying to get my attention for a while, I think. 

My surroundings come back into focus- plaid walls a touch less repulsive than the ones in Harrington’s room, the pool of sick by my feet

I shove the hand away, use the back of my own to wipe the vomit from my lips. “Get the fuck off me.” 

“Alright, there he is. Welcome back.” Harrington’s voice is teasing, but his smile is tentative and concerned, tight lipped. “Don’t worry, man. Happens to the best of us.” 

Ten minutes ago, I’d of laughed it off, maybe even’ve smirked, drawled out “Wonder it’s taken me so long to puke, Harrington, lookin’ at this fuckin’ wall paper every night.” But if this were ten minutes ago, I wouldn’t have thrown up at all. Because ten minutes ago I didn’t know how badly I _want-_. 

Ten minutes ago I didn’t know that the spark that went off in my blood the second I saw him at that Halloween party meant anything besides eagerness for the challenge of stealing his crown. No, it’s an entirely different challenge that I’ve gotten myself into, one not as easy to win as dethroning him. 

And it makes me fucking furious. “I said get off.” I spit, and it’s like I’m poisoning the air as I shove away the arm that’s remade its way to my back again, tracing small, soothing circles. 

“Billy, come on, it’s not a big deal-” Harrington starts, but I cut him off. 

“Stop fucking calling me that. Just- just get out.” I’m shouting now and his face is dropping into an expression like heartbreak, which is really fucking rich, considering. “I’ll clean it up, just get the _fuck_ out, Harrington.” 

His exit barely even registers, tears already welling in my eyes and escaping the moment I hear my door slam. When I bury myself into my bed to close out the rest of the world, I start with the comforter pulled tight over my head, but quickly hurl it to the floor because it smells like him. Of course, the blanket he hogs every goddamn night has absorbed his cologne, his deodorant, his sweat, his- his hairspray. 

So instead, I just jam my headphones over my ears, set the volume to the highest it’ll go, and hope the music distracts me from the fact that I’m crying, the entire position all too reminiscent of the night my father slammed a weight against my head. My father- who called me a faggot. My father- who was right. 

\---  
Waking up on January 1st meant telling myself I didn’t miss Harrington’s warmth beside me in bed. It meant the scent of cleaning products and a darkened, not yet dry circle on the carpet where my vomit had been when I’d fallen asleep. It meant a glass of water and a few painkillers resting on the nightstand. 

It meant a feeling of hopelessness and misery and, worst of all, understanding. The morning of the first day of 1985 meant hating myself more than I ever had before, which- dear fucking God- was saying something. 

January 2nd meant going back to school for the week's remaining days. I had all but avoided Harrington yesterday, feigning a hangover, only leaving my room to eat and use the bathroom when I knew he was napping the room next to me. When he crept into my room to sleep that night, I had waited until I heard his soft snores, extricated myself from the tangle of blankets, and moved to sleep on the couch. 

I’m sprawled on the couch when Harrington sleepily makes his way down the stairs. “You’re on the couch?” His fingers are trying to smooth his hair into something resembling not-bedhead, but it’s futile. 

I grumble an affirmation. 

He rolls his eyes. “Alrighty, then. I’ll make coffee.” 

And I can’t fucking do this. I can’t start my mornings looking at his sleep mussed hair. I can’t watch him start a pot of coffee with enough water for two of us. I can’t ride to school with him and fight over who has control of the stereo. It all resembles what I want too much. It’s all such a shitty, off-brand version of the life I want. 

It’s not possible to go back to twenty four hours ago, before I knew- not possible to view my feelings toward him as jealousy or male aggression or whatever the fuck I had been convincing myself it was for the last two months. 

But what is maybe possible is going back to the contempt I used to treat him with. Anything to dull the ache in my chest as I watch him pour water into the coffee pot, humming Springsteen’s _I’m On Fire_ as he does, the sleeves of his sweatshirt pulled past his palms to protect his hands from the January chill in the house. 

“Okay, that should be done brewing by the time we’re ready to leave. I’m gonna go brush my teeth and all that shit. You coming up?” 

“In a minute.” I say, not looking at him. I haven’t looked at him since that night. 

Even without looking, though, I can feel a shift in the air, the one that comes along with his smirk and his playful voice. “I know it’s cold Hargrove, but don’t go wearing a turtleneck today. Can’t go hiding what _Jackie_ gave you.” 

“Hmm. Yeah.” I say quietly, coldly. Still not looking, still not looking. 

His face drops a little. “Are you good, man?” 

“Peachy, Harrington.” 

“Are you sure? Because-” 

“Christ, do I look like I’m in the mood for this? How are you so-”

_Stupid_. I don’t finish the thought, unable to when I think about the last time I called him stupid, how hurt he looked, the richochet of the front door as it slammed against the frame. 

But still, I think it. I shoved him off of me after I threw up, I ignored him the next day, slept on the couch the next night. He must be stupid if he doesn’t see that I don’t want to talk to him.

Or maybe it’s that he must be stupid if he doesn’t see _why_ I don’t. If he doesn’t see right through me and all the shit I do. 

He takes a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose, like he’s trying to be patient with one of those middle schoolers he looks after. “I’m going to go get ready. I’ll be back down here in like ten. Start fixing your hair now, I don’t wanna be late.” He says it dismissively, like he’s so done with me. 

Good. 

He’s up the stairs and I hear water running. I grab my keys and my jacket and head out the door. He doesn’t need to keep driving me to school- my head’s been fine for awhile now and we both know it. The small kindnesses he grants me stop now. 

\---

My reprieve from Harrington is brief and barely satisfying. In homeroom, he slides into the desk next to me, albeit late. “You are such a fucking dick,” he mutters. “The beamer didn’t have gas.” 

Silence is the only response I provide. Silence and the turn of my head away from him, my hair still wet from a locker room shower that I took upon arriving at school, droplets of cold water splattering on the desk. 

The new year also means a new semester and a new schedule. Being a year behind Harrington, we only have English together. It’s the second to last period of the day and by then, it seems, he’s gotten the message. He sits in the front of the classroom when he sees that I’ve taken up residence in the back. When the teacher calls on him to answer a question that he clearly doesn’t know, I don’t jump in to save him, distracting the teacher or offering up the correct answer like I might’ve before I knew. I pretend I don’t feel a pang at watching him flounder, at his face turning red. 

We drive home in our own cars, with our own music. I pretend I don’t miss his Queen cassette and his voice crooning along with it. 

We eat dinner at different times, eat different leftovers. I pretend I’m even hungry at all. 

When it’s dark and the clock hits 11:30, we’re in our own rooms, in our own beds. I pretend that I’m capable of sleeping. 

At 3:00am, when I hear screams coming from his room, I grit my teeth and tell myself it’s just one of his nightmares. I don’t go check on him. I pretend my heart doesn’t give a kick when it dawns on me that he never has bad dreams when he’s in my bed with me. 

Thursday and Friday are more of the same. We live and exist in the same space but not together. The only change is that basketball starts up again. The two of us play terribly, focusing more on avoiding each other than on actually making any baskets. Coach has murder in his eyes by the time practice ends. 

Friday night brings Hawkin’s first snow of the winter. It’s not the pretty flakes like powdered sugar that I grew up watching in Christmas specials. This stuff is sharp and icy, feels like it’ll draw blood when it slices across your face and comes with wind that screams and howls. 

I’m exhausted. What energy the cold hasn’t leached out of me has been used by the effort it takes to avoid Harrington. At school and at the house, but also when I’m alone at night and my brain starts working. I have to force myself not to think, think about if a faggot is what I really am, think about how screwed I am living with Harrington, think about how if this is really who I am, then I’m in for more pain and heartbreak in my life than I was ever expecting. Think about his pale, mole-dotted skin. Think about his floppy hair that’s beginning to curl at the base of his neck the longer he goes without cutting it. Think about his lips. His lips his lips his lips. 

Because I don’t get to have this, have him, for a hundred reasons. Because that’s not the way the world works and it’s not the way this town works and it’s definitely not the way Harrington works. Boys don’t want other boys to kiss them. Harrington doesn’t want me to kiss him. 

It’s Friday night and it’s snowing and I’m exhausted. And I also really need a fucking drink. There’s only one party that I know of tonight and Harrington left the house at about eight. He didn’t say where he was going, we haven’t said anything, really, in four days, but I’m not braving the party just for a drink. Not if he might be there, not if there’s perfectly good alcohol on his parent’s bar cart. 

I don’t bother with a glass. I only pluck a bottle from the cart, not even checking the label, and begin to wander around the house. There isn’t much, in terms of evidence of family or love. There’s no shortage of paintings of landscapes and far away places I’ll never go, but there aren’t pictures of life- of Harrington’s childhood, his birthdays and vacations and firsts. 

It’s the same on Cherry Lane- all of the pictures of my childhood were left in California, too painful a reminder of my mother. But the absence of photos in my house are from a lack of love. Here, it’s like there’s a lack of presence. The memories weren’t tossed away, there was just no one to witness them in the first place. 

Harrington’s bedroom has a bit more personality, but not by much. I stumble into it, newly drunk after swigging repeatedly throughout my walk around the rest of the house. It was a while ago that I noticed the tack marks on his wall, the unfaded pieces of wallpaper where evidence of his life used to be. I didn’t look further, then, because Harrington had walked in the room. 

He’s not here now, though. I open up his desk drawers. I set aside the Playboys as quickly as my inebriated fingers can manage, not wanting to think about the beautiful girls that Harrington gets off to. The type of beautiful girl he’ll end up marrying someday. 

I dig through homework assignments and school notes and gum wrappers until I reach a stack of photos with tiny pin holes in the corners. 

They’re about what I expect. The most recent ones are of him and Nancy: one with his arm around her as they sit on a couch I don’t recognize, a decorated tree in the corner, and a horrifically festive sweater on Harrington’s upper half, another of them at the quarry, laughing and splashing in the water. I set those aside too, the photographic evidence of what Harrington looks like when he’s happy and in love too much to bear. 

Further into the stack are pictures of him and Tommy and Carol, younger than when I met them, but not by much. They paint a picture of the King Steve I’d heard so much about when I first arrived. They stand together at parties, holding up cans of beer in that too-proud-of-breaking-the-rules way that fourteen year olds do. In those pictures, Carol is always hanging over Tommy, Harrington a side step away from the couple. 

The bottom few pictures of the pile are what make me hesitate, make my fingers trace over the shiny photo paper. They show a young Harrington, smiling so wide and genuinely that I ache. He’s with Tommy in all of them: at the Quarry, at the pool that is currently shining blue-light through the room’s open curtains, at a pumpkin patch, on a couch. 

He looks even happier than he does in the photos with Nancy, but I guess that’s a testament to the naivety of childhood more than anything else. Still, it’s a sickeningly hopeful feeling to see him in the arms of another boy looking that content, that safe and at home. 

It’s dizzying how quickly my brain has switched paths. For seventeen years, I’ve never thought about any of this. Being- being whatever _this_ is. Though, I never grew up imagining a girlfriend or a wife either. Girls are kind and soft, some are even interesting and cool. But when I think about it, they’ve been a way for me to bide time, a way for me to get off, to not feel so alone, whatever. 

I’ve never been in love, I didn’t think I was _capable_ of that.

But when I look at the photos of Steve, happy with Nancy in his arms, maybe even happier with Tommy’s arms around him, I see my feelings for what they really are, for what they’ve always been, I guess. 

For what my dad’s always seen them as. He was right, I suppose, all these years, to hit me for being such a fucking queer. I just didn’t see it yet. Neil’s a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. 

Stupid. Harrington isn’t stupid either, not entirely. He’ll figure me out sooner or later. 

I collapse with a huff to the floor, my back leaning against Harrington’s dresser, the bottle clutched in my fist. I’m pleasantly drunk. Or- it would be pleasant, if I wasn’t _feeling_ so goddamn much. 

My head goes hazy, idly thinking, thinking, thinking, occasionally reminding me to take another pull off the bottle. Think and pull, think and pull. 

There’s the sound of the front door opening downstairs, of keys clattering against the counter and shoes being kicked off. I know Harrington’s home, but I can’t will myself to get up off of his bedroom floor, the alcohol weighing me down like there’s lead in my veins. 

The bedroom door opens. Harrington hums quietly, taking off his jacket, when he notices me. A startled sound escapes him. 

His eyes are wide and his lips form a small O shape and it gives me whiplash, the way that I’m suddenly alert, my focus calculated on the boy in front of me. 

The way I’m angry and, more than that, hurt, that I’ll never make him feel like Nancy or Tommy, never make him feel good. 

That he’ll never be like me, never be overtaken with the need to hold someone he shouldn’t. He’ll always be perfect and whole and exactly what he’s supposed to be. 

It’s that anger and hurt that lifts me off my feet, that puts that animalistic smile on my face, that turns my voice into a whiskey-soaked purr. “Hey, princess. You have a nice little time at the party?” My feet are carrying me closer to him. 

“I wasn’t at a party, I was with Nancy and Jonathan,” he says, trying to sound bored, but the confusion and anger are still laced in his words. “Look who’s finally found his voice again.” 

“Aw, pretty boy, you missed my voice that much?” I’m inching closer and closer, step by step.

His arms are crossed. “Not really. Just curious about how I got lucky enough for you to finally shut up.” 

There it is again. After it’s months’ hiatus, there’s the back and forth, the hatred that’s thinly veiling something more, something deeper. Here I am picking at him like a scab, poking and prodding, trying to get a reaction. And here he is, defensive and fighting back, but having no idea why he has to at all, left wondering what the hell he did to set me off in the first place. 

It’s a familiar position, but it’s one that I understand the meaning of now. 

As long as I’m bothering, he’s looking at me. 

As long as I’m needling, I’m not throwing myself into his arms and begging him to never stop treating me like I’m someone worth helping. 

“Oh, Harrington,” I say, only a step away from him now. “You’ve got to stop hanging around that bitch of yours.” 

Malice leaks into his eyes, but he doesn’t correct me like he usually would. His voice is stoney when he speaks again. “Yeah? Why’s that, Hargrove?” 

I take the final step towards him, lick my lips. “Because you’re a _pussy_ , pining after her like that. A fucking _pussy_.” 

Nose to nose, the beginnings of intimidation start to form on his face. He’s leaning away from me, trying to gain some ground back. I only push further into him and the lack of space to go causes him to fall back onto the bed. Still I press closer, never expanding that inch of space between our faces. 

“Yeah, Harrington, that’s what you are, isn’t it? You’re a little pussy, just like every other bitch in this town.” 

His expression is split between stunned and enraged. “What’s that even supposed to- you’re drunk, Billy. Just go the fuck to bed. You wanna talk again, we’ll do it tomorrow.” 

And that just won’t fucking do. If he can convince me to blow smoke into his mouth, if he can suck hickey’s into my neck, then why can’t I- 

I cluck my tongue disapprovingly. “Uh uh, Harrington, you wanna act like a pussy, I’ll treat you like one.” 

My body hovers over his and I reach my right arm down and slowly move his wrists above his head, hold him there. 

“I’m-m. I’m not a pussy,” He gasps out. 

“Oh I think you are.” I say, catching his wide eyes with my narrowed, aggressive ones. “I know just what pussies like, too.” 

“Hmm?” He murmurs. His voice has gotten so soft, so hoarse. 

“How wet they get when I kiss their necks.” I use my free hand to thumb the collar of his tee shirt down, exposing bare, pale skin, lap my tongue against his collarbone. He’s gone completely still. 

I pull my tongue back, smile against his shoulder, move my head further down his body. “The sounds they make when you pinch their hips.” My fingers close around the skin encasing his hip bone and he lets out a whimper, as if on queue, when I give a pinch. My right hand slowly releases his wrists and moves next to his shoulder to cage him in. 

“The way they buck their hips when you touch the inside of their thighs.” My left hand grazes along the inner seam of his jeans and his hips lift, seeking friction. 

I laugh, cruelly. I leave my hand where it is, but slowly lift my head up to the space by his ear. “You wanna know how I know you’re a bitch, Harrington?”

He doesn’t answer, just looks at me darkly, greedily, confusedly. 

“Because I let go of your wrists a while ago.” My hand raises the small amount it needs to in order for me to squeeze the crotch of his pants. Lips practically touching his ears, I whisper “And you’re hard.” I push myself away from him then, away from the bed, and out the door, slipping into my own room, laughing to myself. 

It felt _good_. Hovering over him, making him react like that, _touching_ him. Made me feel like I wasn’t in this shit alone. 

After a few minutes, I hear him storm out of the house, every door he walks through slamming behind him. 

\---

It must be late afternoon by the time I wake up, the sun is high and warm in the sky. It wasn’t the sun that woke me up though, but Harrington’s frame hovering over me. When he notices my eyes blinking open blearily, his scowl deepens. “That was _fucked up_ , Hargrove.” 

I wrack my brain in attempt to figure out what in the hell he’s talking about, but last night isn’t even a blur, it’s a black hole. “Huh?” 

“You don’t just get to get drunk and then _toy_ with people. It’s not fucking fair, I didn’t _do_ anything.” He looks betrayed and I feel guilt over something that I still can’t dredge up from my memory. 

He continues despite my lack of response. “What, you’re just gonna ignore me for days and then pull that shit? Just get on top of me and- and do _that_? Fuck you.” 

At his words, a few half-formed images fill my mind. His room flooded with blue light from the pool, a bottle clutched in my hand, and later, trapping his body beneath my own, _touching_. Fuck. 

“Harrington, I-” 

“Look, man, I need a break. I stayed at Jonathan’s last night and I’m gonna go back for a few days. Stay here, don’t go back to your house, God, but figure your shit out. I want my _friend_ , Hargrove, not the asshole who beat the shit out of me in October. Got that?” 

“You’re staying at Jonathan’s?” Is all I can think to ask. It’s what stuck in my brain from his speech, the thought of him with another boy, in another boy’s bed sending feelings of jealousy, of rejection through me. “You gonna sleep in his bed?” 

Exasperation takes over his face at warp speed. “What the fuck is it with you? Why you always gotta make shit about people being a pussy or a bitch or a queer? Why is that the worst thing in the world to you? Is it really that bad?” He’s yelling, raking his fingers through his hair. “Because you don’t know shit, Billy. You don’t know a thing about me or about Jonathan or about anyone or anything so stop fucking pretending like you do, like you’ve figured out the worst thing a person can be and it’s a queer. There’s much worse in this world. Think about that, while I’m gone.” 

I’m shaken out of my stunned silence, my frozen position in the bed, then, and I’m standing up to reach out to him, to grab his wrists with so much more tenderness than I did last night. 

“Don’t fucking touch me.” He rips his hands out of my grasps and leaves me standing in my room, guilty and stupefied and alone. Alone alone alone, always ruining what I touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience with this chapter (I was/still am going through a depersonalization episode) and for your comments, likes, and views! I know I always say this, but your comments are just proof that there are actually people in the world reading what I write and it’s so rewarding and makes me want to keep writing this work!! I hope you enjoy it :)
> 
> Some updates: I now have a [tumblr](https://harrin-king.tumblr.com/) and a [spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/496sfn3bu2qpzk0vwoek4gnzi) specifically for stranger things/harringrove nonsense! It would mean a lot if you checked either or both out. I'm also have a couple other fic ideas floating in my head (a post season 3 recovery one shot, a short-ish fic about Beth and Billy at Hawkins together (including Beth getting with our favorite lil Hawkins lesbian), and mayhaps my take on season 4/getting Billy back??). This fic will absolutely be finished!! I just wanted to mention that I might post other stories as well and I'd love if you read them. If not, I'll see you back here for chapter 11 :,)


	11. When After All, It Was You and Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoy this chapter my loves!! I think it's a little shorter but we've been BUILDING to this babey so. heheh. Anyway, your kudos and comments genuinely make me scream and feel so so good it's unbelievable, so if you feel like leaving either, it'd mean the world to me. Much love, dear ones. 
> 
> [tumblr](https://harrin-king.tumblr.com/) [spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/496sfn3bu2qpzk0vwoek4gnzi?si=nErYy9DeQBqxVNcNFXbPzg) (i promised someone that i'd make playlists of the mixtapes in the fic so far! shit! lemme get on that!)

In California, when I was very young, my house was the perfect size. There was enough space for me to crash around and run and play, but I was never too far away from my mother. After she was gone, and even for the few months before, when Neil was always in a rage, it seemed, the walls felt like they had shrunk. They felt like they were closing in so that I was always within range of Neil’s left hook. 

When Max and Susan moved in with us, somehow the walls got smaller, got suffocating. They were trying to hold every weird intricacy and nuance of the relationship between Neil and I, but also trying to hold the performance of love that had pushed through the front door. And that tiny shack in California was much too small to house backhands and kisses on the cheek- outer fucking space isn’t big enough for that. 

It almost made Susan and Neil’s excuse of a “fresh start” plausible, those too-small walls of our house. 

The house on Cherry Lane wasn’t much bigger, but it let us spread out, away from each other, but it was in Hawkins which made it the smallest of all. It wasn’t the perfect size from my childhood, it couldn’t be, when I was isolated from everything I’d known and thousands of miles away from the person I considered home. 

But never in the different years I’ve lived, the houses I’ve lived in, the people I’ve lived with, have I felt that a space was too big. Not until I’m somewhere with enough rooms and enough open space and enough emptiness to be a museum. 

Not until I’m existing in Steve Harrington’s house alone. Without him. 

It makes sense, almost, why he’d allow the boy who beat him three quarters of the way to death to live here with him. I’d let the Devil himself in through the front door if it meant I didn’t have to hear every noise I make echo back at me. 

That, and the guilt. The guilt echoes back at me too, a constant loop in my head. _YouFuckedUpYouFuckedUpYouFuckedUp. He’sGoneHe’sGoneHe’sGone._

Harrington arrives at school everyday in Jonathan’s Ford, clamoring out of the backseat as Nancy and Jonathan exit from the front. He doesn’t look well rested or on top of the world or even happy, but he looks like he feels safe and cared for- not rotting inside too-large walls like I am. 

I keep my promise to Max and drive her to school. Initially, when I told her I would, I hadn’t planned on doing it more than once a week, just enough for her to not feel like I’d abandoned her again. 

But now it’s Wednesday, the third day in a row that I’ve pulled up to my house, taken note of the absence of Neil’s car in the driveway, indicating he had left for work, and honked. On Monday, Max tucked her head out the door, raising her eyebrows, but then came out with her bookbag a few moments later. 

Today, she only gives an affectionate roll of her eyes and stalks out to the car. I can see Susan in the open doorway of the house. She mouths a _thank you_ , I nod my response, third day in a goddamn row. 

The Camaro’s passenger side door slams shut in a flurry of red hair and pale, freckled limbs. “Your dad put chains on his tires. Does your car need chains?” 

“Good morning to you, too.” I nudge the to-go cup Harrington usually uses towards Max. “You drink coffee yet?” 

“So nice of you to finally ask,” she says, lifts the cup from the holder, takes a small sip, tries to mask her disappointment. 

I smile to myself. I knew she was probably too young to need the caffeine, let alone enjoy the taste of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to make only enough for one cup this morning. 

She doesn’t ask where I’m staying, how on earth I have access to good coffee and reusable cups. Her interrogations, it seems, were for Monday and Tuesday. Maybe she was deterred by my refusal to answer and my constant dialing up of the music because today is about _talking_. 

Max babbles the entire way to Hawkins Middle, sipping small, exploratory sips of her coffee occasionally, but never without a grimace afterwards. I try to listen, try to nod along, but I’ve never been the best with children and I’ve definitely never been the best big brother. 

But I must be good enough because she pats my hand almost lovingly when she gets out of the car, calling out a _Bye, shitbird_ before I can beat her to it. I flip her off and it’s a reversal of how we were in October. 

Along with living with Jonathan and riding to school with him, Harrington has been ditching Homeroom with him too. Byers isn’t even in our homeroom, yet Harrington has been absent from his seat next to mine, instead choosing to slip into the boy’s bathroom- the rarely used one that hasn’t been refurbished since the 60s- with Jonathan, coming back out minutes before first period giggling and smelling like weed. Not that I’ve taken notice. 

I turn to Tommy in math, trying to disguise the way I’m fuming. “Byers and Harrington were smoking in the bathroom this morning. Yesterday and Monday too. Didn’t think it’d be the freak who finally made Harrington live a little.” I put on the smirk, the purr, the entire mask that shows I’m just teasing, that I don’t really care. 

Tommy turns his head towards me, trying to be conspiratorial, but mostly coming off as lost. He gives a little laugh and then simply says, “Um. What?” 

Swallowing the irritation that’s encouraging me to punch Tommy’s stupid face, I bare my teeth in what I hope resembles a smile. “Harrington. He doesn’t get high, but now he’s smoking with the Byers freak. Just thought it was weird, is all.” 

Tommy lets out a laugh at that, not a confused one like before, but a full on guffaw. “Who’re you getting your intel from there, Hargrove? Some Freshman girl?”

I look at him bewildered, but mostly irritated. I narrow my eyes and he tries to get a straight face back. “Sorry, sorry. Just- Harrington used to _smoke_ , man, back when he was cool. If someone told you he didn’t, they heard it from some chick whose pants he was trying to get in, or something. Lying to make himself sound like someone you’d bring home to mom and pops.” 

The start of the teacher's lesson cuts off my “But he-,” which is probably for the best. But he what? But he told me he doesn’t smoke? But he had me shotgun him a joint? But he had his lips against mine and that was probably the beginning of the end for me? No, there’s nothing I could say out loud that follows _But he_ \- 

The combination of knowledge that Harrington used to smoke often and-

-and he’d _lie_ and say he hadn’t to get with a girl. 

If there’s one thing this week really didn’t need to throw into the shitstorm swirling in my brain, it’s the idea of Harrington sleeping with enough girls that this was a _move_ of his. 

I’m so tired of knowing that he’s slept with people, that he _will_ sleep with people. 

I’m so tired of knowing a lot of things that all lead to the ultimate thing I’m so tired of knowing: that what I want, who I want, is something, someone, I’ll never have. 

***

Small victory, he shows up to English for the first time since Friday. 

Monumental loss, he sits up front again, as far from my desk in the back as he could possibly be. It’s not lost on me that I’m like every other lovestruck girl that stares at the back of his head- at the small pieces of hair beginning to curl at the nape of his neck- instead of paying attention. 

But it’s not any of the rest of his fan club that get called out for it. “Mr. Hargrove, do plan on being present today, or is glaring into the distance about all you can manage?” Our English teacher says it with a patronizing smile. 

“Please, ma’am, call me Billy. Mr. Hargrove is my father.” I return that exact look, letting easy condescension take over my face, my tone. 

“Okay, can _Billy_ tell us a common theme from the three short stories we’ve been working with?” I can’t make out if she’s bemused or disdainful, but it doesn’t matter because I _can’t_. I’ve been distracted with _HarringtonHarringtonHarrington_ since the semester started, don’t know a damn thing about the stories, let alone their themes. 

I can’t even force out an attempt at an answer or a quip before Harrington’s voice cuts in. “Mrs. Norman? I’m feeling awful sick, can I be excused to the nurse?” 

The teacher looks at him, annoyed. “That’s fine, Mr. Harrington. Write yourself a pass.” 

“Yes ma’am,” Harrington says in that faux-innocent voice of his that always makes me laugh behind my hand. 

He stands up and begins to walk towards the large desk at the front of the room where the hall passes are kept, but he’s wobbling on his feet _dramatically_ , his brow furrowed in what I think is supposed to be distress. He lets out a _woah_ on a particularly rehearsed stumble and I have to clamp the inside of my cheeks between my teeth to keep from howling. 

“Everything alright there, Mr. Harrington?” Mrs. Norman says, jaw set, eyes narrowed. 

“I-I-I’m dizzy, ma’am. I might _faint_ walking to the nurse.” I have no idea what he’s playing at, but I’d be pleased to watch it unfold for eternity. “Maybe someone should walk me? Just in case I, like, _pass out_. Ya know?” His gaze flits my way without quite catching my eye and yeah, okay. I get it.

“I can walk him, ma’am. Coach wouldn’t be too pleased to have something happen to his golden boy.” Before the teacher has even agreed, I’m striding over to catch his elbow. “You’re ridiculous,” I mutter to him. 

The teacher has murder in her eyes, but apparently it’s more important to her to have our charade as far away from her as possible than it is for her to lead her class with some discipline, because all she says is: “That’s enough. You feel _better_ , Mr. Harrington.” 

Low enough so that only I can hear, Harrington whispers, “Please, it’s Steve. Mr. Harrington is my father.” I shove him out the classroom door, desperately needing it to close behind us, unable to hold it together a second longer. 

There’s a light glimmering in his eyes as we collapse into a row of lockers, hands over our mouths to muffle the obscene laughter escaping from our throats. “What the fuck was that, pretty boy?” I whisper between our sharp breaths. 

“You were floundering there. Hurt to watch,” Harrington responds, poking my shoulder. The light fades a little from his eyes, but not completely. “Let’s have a talk, you and me. Yeah?” He unearths his keys from the pocket of his jacket and begins walking towards the school’s exit. I follow. 

***

Things are more sober inside of the Beamer. It isn’t as tense as I imagined our reunion, what with the stunt he just pulled, but there’s clearly something in the air. A conversation that needs to be had. 

Being near him again after so many days of going without is intoxicating and I can’t help myself from trying to get the bad stuff over with, anything so I can laugh with him again. “Harrington I-”

“No. Um. Just, wait okay? I need to say some stuff first, and then you can say what you need to alright?” 

I turn my head away and nod. He continues. “I meant what I said that morning. You shouldn’t have done that shit. Touching me like that… it was a lot. A lot to do when you’re drunk and caging someone in. When you’re saying that they’re a chick or a bitch or a pussy or a queer and. Listen I know we say mean shit to each other. Fuck, for awhile after that night at the Byer’s, the only time you and I ever spoke was to rip on each other like that. I crossed a line with that, called you a fa- a, well, _that_ , and I shouldn’t’ve because I’m trying not to be like that anymore. Call people that shit because Will’s dad used to do that to him and-” 

He turns to look at me, seeming calmer than the morning in his room, but still caught up in his words, still angry. “I’m losing my point. What I mean is, I’m trying to be better and I thought you were too. I don’t wanna go back to us saying that shit about each other because it’s not funny. Maybe I used to think so, but I don’t wanna do that shit with you. Not anymore.” 

Harrington turns to look at me, almost nervously as the car pulls to a stop. The whole time he’s been talking, we’ve been driving, but I hadn’t been paying attention to where we were headed until now. We’re at the quarry, the one I recognize from the background of his and Tommy’s pictures together. “Do you understand?” He asks. 

I swallow thickly. I try to get out a _Yes_ , but it comes out more like a small, garbled choke. Harrington sighs and gets out of the car, leans against the closed driver’s side door. Pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. I watch it all through the vignette of the window. 

For a moment, I’m paralyzed. In retrospect, it’d almost be funny how much we used to rely on that insult, that idea of being a queer, to harass each other. Funny, how one of us wasn’t painfully right about that insult. 

Everything Harrington said during his time to talk was right, too. And it’s how right he is that makes the whole reprimand feel almost worse than one from Neil. My father stopped believing I could be good a long time ago, but Harrington had thought I was different, that I could _be_ good. 

I open my door, walk around to the driver’s side where Harrington is smoking his cigarette. He still looks angry, despite putting what he thought about me in words, saying them to me. 

“So. You do smoke, huh?” 

He gestures with the cigarette, raising his eyebrows in confusion, as if to say _You know I smoke, asshole_. 

“Weed, I mean.” I correct.

His eyes go a little wide, but he soon soothes over his reaction, replacing it with that of deadly calm. “Like I said that morning. You don’t know shit about me.” 

And that- hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts because sometimes it feels like he knows everything about me. Knows too much. “Your favorite thing to get from Golden Palace is the cashew chicken, but you hate cashews.” 

He raises his eyebrows, scoffs. “Real impressive, Hargrove.” 

But he’s staying. He hasn’t walked away, even though he could. Even though he could push me over, get in the car and leave me out here, if he wanted. “You like to listen to pop music in the car, but at home you like older stuff, like your Billy Joel cassette. And on Sundays you only listen to your mom’s records.” I blurt out, too loudly. He looks at me quizzically as the words keep rushing out. 

“You hate reading because you think you’re stupid, but you’re smart, actually. You say really smart things sometimes. And you always take your left shoe off before your right.” I’m panting now, but I can’t stop talking. A knife has sliced me open and I’m bleeding the words, can’t staunch the flow even though it’s giving me away, killing me.

“You hate sleeping in your room and you say it’s because you don’t want to be alone, but I know that it’s more than that, even though I don’t know what. I don’t know a lot, Steve, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have touched you like that and I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t know why you’re good to me when I haven’t even apologized to you and I don’t why you lied about having never smoked before and. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know.” 

“Say it again.” He’s stock still and doe eyed. 

“Say I’m sorry? I- I am, I’m sorry. I should’ve said that months ago.” 

“No, not that. My name. Say it again.” 

“Steve?” I whisper, a question. He takes a step closer, the distance between us shrinking so much differently than how it did on Friday night. 

“Again.” 

“Steve. Steve, why did you lie?” 

He ducks his head in a huff, but not a humorous one. It’s meaningful, charged. “You know why, Billy. 

And that’s another lie because I don’t, I have no idea why he’d lie unless he-

Blink and you miss it. Let your eyelids close for a second; reopen them and there’s a pair of brown eyes warmer than a blanket shared between two people staring at you, into you. 

Reopen them and a pair of lips are whispering _Billy_ before they’re hovering only molecules, only atoms away from yours.

And you can feel their warmth and their softness even though they’re not against yours fully, never against yours because then you and the whole world might burst into flames but they’re _there_ \- before they’re drawing back and whispering. “You know why.” 

And the brown eyes and the warm lips stay _there, there, there_ for one moment, two, three before the boy they belong to shifts back on his heels. 

“I’m coming back home tonight. I can’t listen to The Clash with Jonathan anymore, Billy, I can’t do it. Don’t make me.” 

I only give myself a second to mourn the one moment, two, three, that he pulled back from because he’s coming home and I spent enough days there alone to know that it isn’t, couldn’t be, the wood and drywall structure he’s talking about. 

I only give myself a second to mourn the moment that he ended before it could even begin because to him, home must be something different. 

Must be someone. 

“Yeah, pretty boy,” I say, breathless, but undeniably relieved. Happy. Aching. “Let’s get you home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE let me know what you think of this chapter!! I feel real uneasy about it and I could use some reassurance lol.  
> My semester is over in three days so the chapters should (hopefully, lol) come faster. Some warnings for the rest of this fic.  
> -I don't plan on this being super fluffy. Like, I'm not planning heavy angst either, but them "getting together" is going to be more of a deep and charged homoerotic friendship?? I'm just trying to make this realistic considering the time period, but there will still be sweet moments and, technically, a relationship, but it'll be a little understated.  
> -Also I want to warn that this fic is canon compliant, so consider that a warning?? The ending will be ambiguous but not entiretly happy. I'm kind of just filling in the gap between season 2 and season 3, speculating about what could've happened between Billy and Steve. WITH THAT SAID: I want closure and so do the rest of you, so I'll write a sequel that is NOT canon compliant and gets the ol boys back together, both for your soul and mine.


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